From mobile morgues to pop-up intensive care wards, Britain is responding to coronavirus with a new kind of elemental architecture - and it needs lots of itCoronavirus and culture - a list of major cancellationsCoronavirus - latest updatesSee all our coronavirus coverageAn eerie mechanical hum has joined the usual backdrop of tweeting birds and the roar of the North Circular at Wanstead Flats in London. The sound is coming from behind a large wooden fence, recently erected on wide open fields by Epping Forest, where a group of long, white marquees poke up above the tree line. It looks like the makings of a beer festival, but the reality is far more bleak: the hum is not coming from beer taps, but from a generator that will be used to keep a fleet of storage units at 4C for the coming weeks - the temperature required to prevent human corpses from decomposing.Covering an area the size of two football pitches, this new complex is a temporary mortuary, one of many such structures that are being erected at lightning speed across the UK to cope with the rising death toll from the coronavirus pandemic. This East End outpost is conveniently next to the City of London Cemetery and Crematorium, and just three miles from the new NHS Nightingale hospital at the ExCel convention centre - a strategic location for what the Newham mayor Rokhsana Fiaz described in a letter to local residents as `a holding point before a respectful and dignified cremation or burial can take place to send a loved one on their final journey`. It is a storage depot that grieving relatives will, of course, never be allowed to visit. Continue reading...
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