'A Revelation Suitcase Architecture': a case study of Vale of Leven Hospital, the first new hospital for the National Health Service in Britain
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Harriet Richardson Blakeman considers Vale of Leven Hospital in the context of the early years of the National Health Service, looking at the process of design, the choice of construction methods, and the impact of this early attempt to redefine hospital architecture for the Welfare State.
Architectural Press Archive / RIBA Collections
Vale of Leven represented a fundamental re-thinking of hospital architecture: in plan, construction, and image. It offered a blueprint for what a modern National Health Service architecture could be. Standardised planning was coupled with rationalised construction and an almost domestic scale, with low-rise, timber-clad buildings arranged in a grid formation. Inside, any sense of the institutional was subverted by light, bright interiors with contemporary furnishing. The results contrasted dramatically with vast majority of older hospitals inherited by the NHS in 1948.
Vale of Leven was opened in 1955, a decade often side-lined by historians in favour of the boom years of the 1960s, 70s and 80s. By taking into account the mechanism and processes behind the NHS hospital building from the evidence of the minutes, memoranda and correspondence of those responsible new schemes, this paper sheds new light on how hospital architecture developed in Britain in the 1950s. It argues that this period was rich in experimentation and innovation, laying the foundations for later developments, but also offers some reasons why the achievements of this decade seem so soon to have been forgotten.
Harriet Richardson Blakeman is a PhD Student at Edinburgh College of Art, at the University of Edinburgh, researching Scottish hospital architecture of the first fifty years of the National Health Service. She was part of the Survey of London team from 1991-2018, contributing to a number of their volumes, and has published on the architectural history of hospitals. She is the creator and author of a wordpress site, https://historic-hospitals.com, an architectural gazetteer.
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