RMH Block A – May 2023 proposal

Ideas for the development of the Ravenscourt Park Hospital campus are beginning to emerge from the new owners Telereal Trillium with their architects SPPARC Studio. There’s an interesting ‘information pack’ with historic photos and maps on their project website; here we include the key views from the May 2023 exhibition boards.

We’ve also seen detailed comments from the two adjoining Residents Associations – Ravenscourt Gardens and Ravenscourt Square – who both have significant concerns about adjacency and the effect of access requirements for a substantial housing development on their doorsteps. These have been submitted to the council, and while noting them, here we look more at the effect the proposals would have on the Grade II* listed building and its setting.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

As proposed, the development would harm the buildings it’s supposed to improve.

The scheme proposes that the 1930’s hospital buildings would be enlarged by adding two, three or four upper floors, generally set back from the building edge, and faced with saw-tooth profile glazed curtain wall shown in the CGI’s above. The roof extensions would be limited to one level on the outer blocks of the principal building “Block A” facing Ravenscourt Park, which would be refurbished and converted for a community use yet to be defined; the remaining buildings would be refurbished and converted to residential use.  We would welcome an open and inclusive process of co-design to evaluate possible future uses of Block A, to arrive at a defined and sustainable use that works for the community and developer.

The 1978 surgical and ancillary building on the northwest corner, beside Ravenscourt Square, is proposed to to be replaced by a residential block and a separate care-home block, shown as undefined white blocks “E” and “F” in the model above.

The hospital building is a stand-alone architectural whole, a form which does not readily invite extension. It employs a restrained, consistent architectural language, with regular geometric brick forms, orderly window perforations, playful articulation separating the building elements with circular balconies and pavilions, and a bold, heroic principal block facing the park. These unique qualities would be overwhelmed by the changes proposed. The roof extensions would impose an architectural levelling-up, bringing an inappropriate sameness to the distinctly separate elements of the buildings. The eye-catching angular glazing design would be at odds with the quiet regularity of the buildings below, and would hardly reflect the visual subservience required in planning policy.

RMH Blocks E & F as proposed May 2023

The new buildings proposed for the northwest corner “E” & “F” are shown only in diagram form on the display board image adjacent, and further design information is needed, including contextual views showing the relationship of the new blocks to the hospital buildings, the overall campus, and the neighbouring buildings of Ravenscourt Square – especially Grade ll No. 11, and locally listed No. 17 on the corner.

There is also proposed access East-West through the site, between blocks “D” and “E”, which is not currently possible, and it’s fair the say that there are mixed views about this proposed feature in the adjoining communities.

The NPPF (National Planning Policy Framework) sets out the relevant policies for listed buildings, and requires that alterations proposed to heritage assets are assessed by Historic England according to the extent of harm they would cause, and states that ‘…substantial harm to a grade ll* listed building should be wholly exceptional’ (NPPF para 200). Some concessions may be allowed where the changes would support the future conservation of the building, or would bring about significant public benefit.

These criteria rule out the current proposals: the extensions would bring very substantial harm to this wonderful building. While they could generate funds for the conservation of the building and gardens, the accommodation they provide would bring no benefit to the public.

Conclusion

The early opportunity for public involvement is welcome, and we have carefully reviewed the May 2023 proposals, and set out our response above, together with a letter containing the same points to the council planners.

Restoring the Ravenscourt Hospital buildings and bringing the campus, particularly Block A into community use is a long overdue realisation of a wonderful asset, and we wholly support this project intent.  However, the current proposals are unacceptable, and would destroy the wonder of this building. The scheme design is heading in the wrong direction, and an alternative approach has to be found to realise this project.

Historic England listing

Below we summarise key sections of the listing. The full listing is on the HE website.

HISTORY: The Royal Masonic Hospital opened on the 13 July 1933. It was completed remarkably quickly, in just 13 months, the foundation stone having been laid by the Duke of Connaught on 13 May 1932. It cost £400,000, about twice the expense of a standard hospital of the time, funded by the Freemasons as a private hospital with 200 beds. Until 1973, a book containing the names of the subscribing masons’ lodges was kept in the lobby and a page turned every day at 11am; the book’s calligraphy was done by the sister of Gilbert Bayes, whose sculpture features on the façade.

Sir John Burnet, Tait and Lorne won the commission in competition in 1929. The winning entry was Neo-Georgian in style with pitched roofs and dormer windows. Soon after Thomas Tait, the principal architect, revised the elevations, introducing a Netherlands-inspired modernist style in brick with flat roofs. This signalled a significant change in direction for Burnet, Tait and Lorne, whose work up until this point had been defined by stone-fronted classical buildings such as the Edward VII Galleries at the British Museum and the Daily Telegraph offices on Fleet Street. The finished hospital was, in the words of Tait, ‘a complete departure from traditional forms … one of the few really modern hospitals in the world today’ and had been ‘designed from the inner requirements outwards rather than from a preconceived idea of what the hospital should look like on the outside, and making the conditions fit these as best they could’. The building’s form reflected contemporary medical ideas. Natural light and fresh air were considered crucial to recovery and so the two wings of the ward block feature three storeys of deep, curved concrete sundecks at the southern end. The balconies utilised new welding technology to achieve a deep cantilever but minimal thickness of concrete floors. The chief construction engineer was Sven Bylander, an American of Swedish descent, who had worked on the pioneering steel-framed Ritz and Waldorf Hotels in London in 1905.

The hospital won the RIBA Gold Medal in 1933 for best new building and the London Architecture Bronze Medal in 1934. It was praised by the architectural press, which considered it to be the first major ‘modern’ building in the UK. CH Reilly wrote in the Architects’ Journal in 1934, for example, ‘there is no doubt that the event of the year is the Royal Masonic Hospital’ praising it for releasing hospital architecture ‘once and for all from architectural flummery and pretence’. Country Life called it ‘from an architectural point of view … one of the most successful, because one of the most truly functional, of contemporary buildings in this country’. HS Goodhart-Rendel, writing in 1953, was more sceptical of its claims to pure functionalism, writing ‘this entertaining building manages to satisfy every medical requirement within a most arbitrarily picturesque exterior’. Indeed, the building articulated its health-giving purpose not only through its form but via artworks too: the façade, for example, features two allegorical sculptures of Healing and Charity by Gilbert Bayes and the stairwell bears a low-relief panel by CL Doman and the inscription ‘Aegros Sanat Humanitas’, meaning ‘humaneness heals the sick’.

In 1938 a nurses home was built, also to designs by Burnet, Tait and Lorne; it is separately listed at Grade II. The same architects continued to work on the hospital after the Second World War, building the Wakefield Wing to the west of the main site in 1959. This provided extra beds for patients, nurses, a physiotherapy department and additional office accommodation. In 1978, a surgical block in brick with zinc roofs was added to the north of the main buildings to designs by Watkins Gray Woodgate. This is connected to the original buildings by a link corridor. In 1990, the 1930s buildings were refurbished and the original steel windows replaced in aluminium in a design that reflected the original glazing bar arrangement.