Hospital design a suitable case for treatment: As a minister puts NHS architecture under the scalpel, Jonathan Glancey is pessimistic in his prognosis

DOES THE very sight of an NHS hospital make you ill? It can have that effect on Tom Sackville, Under-Secretary of State for Health, who yesterday dissected the legacy of the health service architecture with the delicacy of a trainee butcher.

Speaking at the Hospital and Care Premises Management conference at the National Exhibition Centre, Birmingham, Mr Sackville described one NHS hospital in London as 'a forbidding hulk of stained concrete', and called for architects to use 'a bit of imagination and common sense' to give hospital architecture a much-needed facelift.

Admitting that central government has been responsible for penny-pinching health buildings with little regard for the public, Mr Sackville said: 'We have put up some real corkers. A particularly extreme example, a district hospital only half a mile from one of the capital's most sublime historic buildings - and I'm not talking about the one opposite the House of Commons, though that is no oil painting - can only be described as a forbidding hulk of stained concrete.'

Mr Sackville was referring to Guy's Hospital (the sublime building is St Paul's Cathedral), dominated since 1975 by the 30-storey Guy's Tower. This frightening building, one of the tallest and ugliest of its kind in Britain, houses the maternity and children's wards.

Mr Sackville said: 'This is not the sort of environment in which we should be treating patients. While our hospitals should be efficient and functional places, they must have attractive and visually appealing exteriors and must reflect the welcome and warmth that patients will find within.'

He could be said to have a blinkered view of British hospital design. While such buildings as Guy's Tower and the slightly earlier Northwick Park Hospital, blighting views of Harrow-on-the-Hill in north-west London, are irredeemably ugly, when the NHS has encouraged a cosy style of building the results have verged on extreme banality.

The Princess Royal Hospital in Telford, Shropshire, is typical of a new generation of 'user-friendly' hospitals, its architectural style drawn from edge-of-town supermarkets that try too hard to look like olde worlde village barns.

Yet the NHS has built several sophisticated and approachable hospitals in recent years. St Stephen's in Fulham, south-west London, St Mary's on the Isle of Wight, and Homerton Hospital in east London are buildings of which it can be proud.

Mr Sackville avoided discussion of hospitals under threat of closure in central London, some of which contain fine historic architecture which none of us should want to lose. Two of central London's most elegant hospitals, now closed, were Charing Cross, off the Strand, and St George's, fronting Hyde Park Corner. Charing Cross (1831-34), an elegant Roman pile designed by Decimus Burton, has recently been converted into an office block, while at St George's scalpels have given way to knives and forks; the neo-Greek hospital (William Wilkins, 1827-29) is now the lavish Lanesborough Hotel.

Nodding respectfully to the Prince of Wales, whose taste in genteel neo-Georgian architecture he clearly shares, Mr Sackville said: 'I would like to give notice that, as the minister with specific responsibility for the NHS estate, I will be taking a particular interest in the design work involved in major capital proposals.' We can only await the results with bated breath.

Architecture, page 19

(Photographs omitted)