*Historical* This road at Carshalton On The Hill led to the site of a medical research facility. It was at Wellfield Gardens to be exact – a road named after the nearby wood and the original lane leading to the Medical Research Council.
This location has a fascinating history and it’s where Rudolf Vrba once worked, a man credited with saving hundreds of thousands of lives during the Second World War. Here’s a very brief look at his life in Carshalton.
Vrba was born in 1924 in the country now known as Slovakia. He was imprisoned at the Auschwitz Concentration Camps in German-occupied Poland in 1942 at the age of just 18. In April 1944 he escaped and alerted ‘the world’ to the atrocities happening there. 1
He is credited with saving 200,000 Hungarians. The first Jew to break out of Auschwitz — one of only four who ever successfully pulled off that feat — to reveal the truth of the death camp to the world and to warn the last Jews of Europe about what awaited them at the end of the railway line. 2
An intelligent Biochemist specialist, in 1960 he moved to England and lived in the London Borough of Sutton, where he worked for the MRC (Medical Research Council) Neuropsychiatric Research Unit in Carshalton, at that time in Surrey. The building opened in 1950 and was sited at Woodmansterne Road.
“The United Kingdom Medical Research Council Toxicology Research Unit, located about 15 miles south of London in the suburb of Carshalton, was one of the most exciting places for mechanistic research in toxicology during the 1960s”
“The unit occupied most of the space in a large building, located on a few dozen acres of open ground.” 3
Vrba wrote several academic papers here, and sent a letter to The Observer newspaper which was signed Sutton, Surrey.4
He became a British subject by naturalisation on 4 August 1966, He then moved to Canada with a colleague in 1967.5 Rudolf Vrba died in 2006.
The BIBRA Building
Next door to the site of the MRC was a place known as the BIBRA building, built in the 1960s. This was a medical centre that gained notoriety for conducting animal experiments – mostly for medical research, but also for cosmetics.6 In 1997, BIBRA were in the national news headlines. Up to 150 protestors descended on Carshalton to highlight the plight of animals used in testing. The facility was eventually closed in 2005.7 It was demolished in 2011.8 The laboratory was on the site of what is now Lavender Oaks Care Home on Metcalfe Avenue (marked on map above).
This circa 1970 map below appears to show the location of the BIBRA building to the left of the ‘Q’ in Queen Mary’s Hospital.
We hope you find this interesting, and we reserve the right to update this post as new content comes to light. We began researching this post back in August 2023 and appreciate your comments and feedback below. It’s not clear what work Vrba conducted in Carshalton, but the Medical Research Council says “The MRC considers the use of animals to be necessary in many areas of biomedical research in order to better understand the living body and what goes wrong in disease. Animal research is essential in the development of safe and effective ways of preventing or treating diseases.All our animal research is conducted in accordance with UK law and ethically approved by an independent review board. MRC researchers are expected to follow the highest standards of animal welfare”
Sources
1. https://mjhnyc.org/blog/top-programs-2022/
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Vrba
3. https://academic.oup.com/toxsci/article/62/1/4/1720006
4. https://www.arlindo-correia.com/020605.html
5. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2006/apr/13/guardianobituaries.secondworldwar
6. https://www.oblivionstate.com/community/threads/bibra-carshalton-august-2010-2013.5202/
7. https://www.28dayslater.co.uk/threads/bibra-animal-testing-laboratory-surrey-march-2010.48742/
8. https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2010/04/449116.html
View a walk around Carshalton On The Hill
Thanks for taking the time to read this post. Please do add your own thoughts, clarifications, pictures and further details here (however big or small). This is an ongoing blog post that is being updated as required, as time goes by…
Thank you for providing this detail. I read Jonathan Freedland’s biography of Rudi Vrba (The Escape Artist) last year, and his work in Carshalton was mentioned. I tried to find where / what the neuropsychiatric research unit of the Medical Research Council was, but drew a blank.
Thanks for the info