DIMH 2021 CONFERENCE


Royal Hospital for Sick Children, Edinburgh (2016-2019).


James Leadbitter and his team also worked with the NHS at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Edinburgh and its new CAMHS unit, again collaborating with Projects Office.


The ‘perfect bedroom’ The ‘vacuum cleaner’ and his team had also suggested the children ‘design their perfect bedroom’. He elaborated: “We talked to John Lewis, and the children also went and took photographs of natural features such as local hills, which we then printed out, and the children then made their ‘perfect bedrooms’ using cardboard boxes, with, for instance, dog beds and rabbits in them; it was great.” He continued: “We got them to design the whole ward, drew a big area on the floor, and asked them what elements and spaces they would like within this ‘perfect place’. They came up with about 140 ideas, and we then had to work out the potential adjacencies, with the children making their own suggestions – such as ‘The rope slide should go into the therapy room; that would be ‘hilarious’.


A play-based installation “At the conclusion of this process,” the speaker explained, “we had all these suggestions from the children about their ‘ideal’ environment." He said: “Our goal was then to produce objects to symbolise this, which translated into this little play-based installation, which will be at the Wellcome Foundation for the next nine years.” Visitors to it could, James Leadbitter explained, go and sit in it and play with the objects that these children made, and ‘read about why they think a puppy, or a bath, are important in a mental health ward’. The art installation also features details on the children’s research, who they are, and how they want to define themselves in terms of race, gender, and ethnicity, ‘not just in terms of disability’. This work was undertaken in conjunction with Muf Art /Architecture, ‘an amazing female-led architectural practice in London’. The team also staged ‘a festival’ in St Helens on Merseyside, which at the time had the UK’s highest suicide rate, ‘losing somebody every fortnight’. While ‘some good work’ had already been undertaken to address this, James Leadbitter explained that an arts


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A community space in Liverpool – open for three months.


The temporary mental health space in Liverpool, designed by a small architectural practice, Projects Office, saw some 300 people actively using the space coming to the workshops.


organisation had invited him to curate the festival, and build an environment around it. He explained: “We turned an empty Argos shop into a mental health hospital for a month, with a bell tent within it as a ‘chillout’ zone’. It also had a theatre made out of carpet underlay and scaffolding, and some tree branches from a skip.”


Makeshift mental health hospital well visited


The ‘space’ created also accommodated a 7-metre table made from a single piece of wood. James Leadbitter explained: “We had about 200 people coming in off the street each day, without any advertising or press, with a message on a board saying: ‘Free tea, and chats – come and talk about mental health’. Every day people were just coming in and chatting to strangers.” He added: “You can see that there was no thought about health and safety in this space – we were just going for it.” When visitors arrived, they were welcomed, offered a cup of tea, and had the ‘boundaries’ within the space, such as, for example, not taking drugs there, made clear to them. The experience had been ‘good and fun’, the speaker explained. James Leadbitter went on to explain that he and his team had also been working with the NHS at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Edinburgh and its new CAMHS unit, again working with Projects Office. He said: “Projects Office did a fantastic job designing the unit, and we again held workshops with the children, their carers, parents, and the staff. We asked them all what it was like to be in this environment, and to think about it in a


Get people talking about mental healthcare design, because it’s not just relevant in hospitals, but also in the home, our cities, and streets


utopian, optimistic way. They spoke about the seaside; that feeling of the smell of the sea, and that sense of ‘horizon’. We also discussed how we could make something that feels homely; this was important to the young people, but the staff suggested we shouldn’t make it too homely – because some of the children’s homes weren’t great environments, and we had to get that balance right, or they might have wanted to stay here permanently.”


Get the message across in the press


The speaker again emphasised the importance of talking about such work in the mainstream press. He said: “Get people talking about mental healthcare design, because it’s not just relevant in hospitals, but also in the home, our cities, and streets.” The vacuum cleaner and his team also visited the high-secure Broadmoor Hospital in Berkshire, and ‘put the same questions to patients there that they had asked everywhere else’. He said: “Our work on all of this is ongoing, and at Great Ormond Street we produced a huge amount of research, having spent considerable time talking to patients and staff, all of which is now being fed into the brief that the architects have for this new ward. I’d thus ask: ‘So how can the children who use these inpatient services be writing the briefs that you guys work from, and how much better would those briefs be?’” That takes time, he conceded, because, as he put it, ‘they need to feel safe and secure and trusted to do that’.


A ‘brief’ informed by young inpatients


It had been ‘great’, James Leadbitter said, that Great Ormond Street had been willing to take many of the young patients’ suggestions as a brief for a new ward. “For example,” he added, ‘How can a mental health ward give you the experience of being with a puppy?’ So,” he continued, “do we continue as a mental health community – including the design and


JANUARY 2022 | THE NETWORK


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