What does one million square feet of empty space look like? Anyone who stepped inside the NHS Nightingale Hospital in East London yesterday will know only too well. The facility, constructed under military supervision inside the ExCel conference centre in April, is no longer there; no equipment, no staff and certainly no patients. ‘It’s closing down,’ a security guard told us. Even without venturing through the entrance, that much was obvious. An NHS road sign initially erected to direct ambulances arriving at the site could be seen lying beside a wall, and dozens of partition walls — some with NHS labels attached — were dumped in a storage pen.