A mortuary for people weighing up to 50 stone is to open in the UK across the road from an Ibis hotel and Europe’s largest ice-cream factory – how ironic is that?
The state of the art facility has been designed to cope with Britain’s ever expanding waistline and is part of a new £4.6m (€5.5m) coroner’s court in Corinium Way, Gloucester.
The courtroom section of the new facility is currently open, but the morgue end of things won’t be operational until April this year. According to the Irish Independent, the facility has room for 62 corpses and has extra space to accommodate taller and wider bodies.
There are three ‘oversized’ trollies, two of which can hold bodies up to 35 stone and one that can hold a whopping 50 stone or 318kg if you’ve finally moved to metric.
Strangely enough, the new coroner’s court and morgue is located just across the road from Barnwood’s Ibis Hotel and Birds Eye Walls, Europe’s largest ice cream factory. Now that’s a subtle health warning if ever we’ve seen one.
Scott Riddell, centre manager said, “The hotel people have been great to us.
“While the building work was going on for this site they let people who wanted to take a look park there, which was a real bonus.”
It just goes to show the knock-on effect that obesity has on society.
