A junior staff nurse’s uniform dating from 1974… complete with ink blot [Wellcome Collection]

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FOR Godiva Marian Thorold there were very strict rules when it came to her nurses and their uniforms. A contemporary of Florence Nightingale, Thorold was Lady Superintendent of Nursing at the Middlesex Hospital for 35 years until 1905 and devoted her career to reforming the reputation of nurses and gaining them professional status.

Of her exacting uniform standards, she once remarked: “I devised this little train so that when you lean over a bed to attend to a patient, your ankles will be covered and the students will not be able to see them.”

Thorold is just one of the figures featured in the Fitzrovia Chapel’s latest exhibition, In Uniform: Stories of Nurses and their Clothing.

The beautiful chapel, tucked away just off Tottenham Court Road, was once part of the Middlesex Hospital – a training hospital that served central London for more than 200 years.

When the hospital closed in 2005 and was later demolished, the preserved Grade II* listed chapel became something of a pilgrimage site for former nurses.

These regular visits were the chief inspiration for the exhibition, according to co-curator Freya Bently.

“The returning nurses often reminisced about their time there, with stories of their uniforms serving as a common thread – recalling the folding of hats, being scolded for a skirt that was too short, or receiving a belt-buckle at graduation,” she says.

Mannequins are dotted around the chapel showcasing uniforms throughout the ages from the 1880s through to the 2020s. We see how the original flourishes of the early Victorian uniforms made way for the streamlined, more practical designs we are familiar with today.

Godiva Marian Thorold photographed in 1891 [Wellcome Collection]

There are also some indelible relics from their time in service like the ink blot on the chest of one – a casualty of a leaky fountain pen.

With the birth of the NHS in 1948 came the opportunity for a standardised national uniform.

Some of the first were designed by Sir Norman Hartnell, dressmaker to the Queen Mother and later to Queen Elizabeth II.

Central to the exhibition and most compelling are contributions from former nurses, with some items for display. They also provide touching accounts reflecting on their training and the pride they felt wearing the uniforms.

In tandem with these are responses to the exhibition which visitors are invited to write on fabric “postcards”. Pinned onto a uniform hanging from a wardrobe, one contributor details how she met her future husband while training at the Middlesex Hospital. Another reflects on the excellent standard of training.

Away from the ward we also see how the uniform has permeated popular culture.

A mannequin wearing one of designer Pam Hogg’s creations from her Apocalypse Collection is on display.

As the exhibition attests: “Hogg’s PVC crosses nod to the wipe-clean world of fetish wear in which an abstracted, highly sexualised ‘naughty nurse’ is a common sight.”

Dr Jo Horton, textile historian and co-curator hopes the exhibition will “inspire a deeper appreciation of the role uniforms play, not just in professional settings, but in the broader cultural landscape”.

“Nurses’ uniforms are more than just garments; they are symbols of resilience, compassion, and innovation,” she adds.

As for Thorold, there is a recreation of the uniform she would have worn.

Made of black silk and with a cap of “beautiful lace, with strings and a huge bow that hung at the level of what might reasonably have expected to be her waist”, it is a reminder of just how much the uniforms have changed.

Equal to her strict sartorial standards was her own punishing work ethic. Thorold was “early on duty and seldom retired before midnight”.

Today her name and her role in nursing is immortalised in a plaque in the Fitzrovia Chapel with the simple words: “Faithful and beloved.”

• In Uniform: Stories of Nurses and their Clothing is at the Fitzrovia Chapel Fitzroy Place, 2 Pearson Square, W1T 3BF until Dec 1. See fitzroviachapel.org