The Dolls’ Hospital was an institution in Manchester city centre for over 50 years
Doc Higgins’ Dolls’ Hospital on London Road in Manchester in 1969 (colourised)(Image: Mirrorpix)
Imagine you’re a child, carefully pushing open the heavy door to an old shop. You cough as you enter, your lungs filling with the smell of dust and glue.
Through the entrance, there’s a narrow, dimly lit staircase. You climb each creaking step to the top and step into another room.
You look up to see grinning heads suspended from the ceiling. Bodies and limbs hang from hooks. In the corner, the hat-wearing man hasn’t noticed you’ve entered the gloom where he busily works.
As you walk towards him, a jar packed with eyes seems to follow your every move. The one-eyed doll you had been dragging along is now held tightly against your chest.
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This might sound like a horror film or nightmare, but it was quite the opposite.
Despite being one of the creepiest places in Manchester, the Doll Hospital was where many broken hearts were healed.
Situated on London Road since the 1930s, the Dolls’ Hospital became a well-known landmark in Manchester, just a stone’s throw away from Piccadilly Station. For over half a century, parents brought their children’s beloved dolls to the shop’s proprietor, John Higgins, for repairs.
Entrance to the Dolls’ Hospital on London Road, Piccadilly, Manchester, 1970(Image: @Manchester Libraries and Local Archives)
Known affectionately as Doc Higgins, he was the resident ‘surgeon’ who restored smiles to the faces of generations of heartbroken children. The shop even boasted an ‘ambulance’ service that would collect poorly dolls from homes and return them safely once they had ‘recovered’.
However, the shop wasn’t the most inviting place, especially for young children reluctant to part with cherished dolls that needed some TLC.
When the @inostalgiauk account shared a photograph depicting the Dolls’ Hospital on X (formerly Twitter) in 2020, one reply simply stated: “The Dolls Hospital was like a horror film, bits of bodies everywhere in a poor[ly] lit room.”
A young girl outside the Original Dolls Hospital, Piccadilly, Manchester. 17th January 1969(Image: Mirrorpix)
Posts about the Dolls’ Hospital on the We Grew Up In Manchester Facebook group have also prompted similar reactions.
Christine Holland, commented: “It was creepy, all bits of dolls in the window.”
Sarah Baker-Saunders wrote: “Wonderful memories, scary shop.”
Susan Jaleel recalled the establishment as “the creepiest place in the whole of town.”
John Clifford Higgins, known as Doc Higgins, at work at the Original Dolls Hospital, Piccadilly, Manchester. 17th January 1969
Lynn Chapman remembered ascending the narrow staircase to a cramped room containing “lots of doll parts”, noting it was “very frightening when you are a young child.”
Patricia M Ahern concurred, writing: “I remember my mum took me with my broken doll. I was petrified when we entered the shop and saw the hundreds of dolls just piled up… I didn’t want to give my doll to what seemed to me a very strange man.”
While Emma Jenkins simply compared it to “a little shop of horrors”.
Doc Higgins, repairer of broken toys in his workshop – the Manchester Dolls’ Hospital. 1980(Image: Mirrorpix)
Adding: “[I] wish there was surviving photographs of those limbless one-eyed dolls with no hair. What a lovely man though, repairing all our well worn, war torn babies.”
Thanks to the Mirrorpix archive, photographs captured inside the Dolls’ Hospital have survived.
The pictures were snapped in the late 1960s and in the 1980s, when Doc Higgins decided to retire.
It was reported in the Manchester Evening News on June 21, 1988, that Doc Higgins had put the shop on the market. After being admitted to hospital earlier in the year, he told the journalist: “I have still got the records of the dolls I have mended and I know I have made a few thousand kids happy. It has broken my heart to have to turn people away over the last few weeks, but my legs have gone and I have lost the grip in my hands. I don’t want to give it up, but really I have no choice.”
Some of the dolls heads waiting for new bodies at the Dolls’ Hospital, Piccadilly, Manchester. 28th December 1987
It was thought his son, Gordon, would take over the family business. However, he found the hospital too much to run alongside his full-time job as a lorry driver.
‘The man at the hospital was kindness itself’
Having had several premises along London Road over the years, in the 1980s, the shop was based next to the Imperial Hotel pub. The building was demolished in 1997, and now a Malmaison Hotel stands in its place.
Despite the Doll’s Hospital being no more, thousands of children will be forever grateful to Doc Higgins for giving their battered and well-loved dolls a new life. One such example can be found in a letter printed in the M.E.N. in August 1999, from Mrs A Robertson.
Doll doctor Gordon Higgins took over from his father, John, who was the original Doc Higgins at the Dolls Hospital, Piccadilly, Manchester. 28th December 1987(Image: Mirrorpix)
Mrs Robertson, who had grown up in Manchester, said she had returned to the city to find that the Dolls Hospital had been replaced by a “posh new hotel”. She remembered taking her doll, Millie, to Doc Higgins at the hospital in the 1940s.
“I was heartbroken, but the man at the hospital – they called him The Doctor – was kindness itself,” she wrote.
The Dolls Hospital (right of image) on London Road in 1958. The shop had been a fixture in Piccadilly since the 1930s(Image: @Manchester Libraries and Local Archives)
“Nevertheless, I couldn’t help crying all the way home on the tram, wondering if Millie would get better and if I would ever see her again. You can imagine what joy I felt when my mum took me back a couple of weeks later to collect her – good as new.
“I slept wonderfully that night having Millie back alongside me at bedtime. The Dolls Hospital must have mended many a little girl’s broken heart – as well as their dollies.”
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