INTERVIEW
Clockwise from top left: Some of Murphy Philipps’ recent projects include Queen Mary’s Hospital, located in Sidcup, Kent, the Nelson Local Care Centre, in Merton, South West London, Ealing CDC, the Tessa Jowell Health Centre in East Dulwich, London, and the Finchley Memorial Hospital.
Service user engagement… is absolutely key to delivering a good healthcare project. Your end users are the people that are going to experience that space and you have to understand – whether it’s staff or whether it’s patients or whether it’s carers – how they’re going to use that space.
it’s about the user engagement – it’s about encapsulating that within our schemes.
Take, for example, the Samaritans project. What were some of the key challenges you encountered on that? PM: One of the key [challenges] on Samaritans was the budget. It’s a third sector scheme – all of the money was charitable funds so you have to be sure that every penny of what you’re spending is actually going into something meaningful. In the call centre, which is one of the key spaces in that building, generally they’re in a very stressful situation – they’re taking a call from someone who’s distressed and they need to be able to get them into a space where they can try and calm them down, so, the quietness of that space is really important, the acoustics of that space is really important, and the calmness of that space is really important, and you need to be able to bring that out in the design. But on the other side of that, you need to think that these are volunteers and once they’ve dealt with somebody like
this, they need a little bit of decompression time. So, it’s also about having some breakout areas and some rest and relaxation spaces where the volunteers can just go and take a break and get ready for the next time.
With regards to sustainability, how would you say that fits into your design process and your day-to-day decision making? PM: For a practice, there’s two elements to that. There’s obviously the sustainability of the designs that we do, and there’s sustainability in the office and our own impact in terms of what we’re doing day-to-day. So within a building, it’s very much about the energy
use, the materials we’re using, thinking about the carbon footprint of that. So that’s the design element – which I would say most architects do. Within the office, it’s very much about looking at
ourselves, making sure that we’re not travelling more than we need to and just being much more aware of what we’re doing. And probably a good example of that is that
May 2026 Health Estate Journal 39
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