ESTATE REDEVELOPMENT
Where service-users and staff feel valued
In an article in the July 2020 The Network, Richard Coe, Project director at Kajima Partnerships, discussed the firm’s joint venture with Sir Robert McAlpine Capital Ventures as the master developer for the South West London and St George’s Mental Health NHS Trust Estate Modernisation Programme centered particularly on The Springfield University Hospital site in London’s Wandsworth. Here – in a follow-up piece – Teva Hesse, director of the London office of CF Møller Architects, explains the practice’s part in the ambitious site redevelopment to create a new ‘community’ of mental health facilities expected to delivered from 2022 onwards.
C.F. Møller Architects’ engagement with the design of mental health facilities began in July 2011. After nearly a decade, this is the first time I have sat down to reflect on the scope and relevance of what our practice has undertaken. This is an appropriate time, as our first new facilities are under construction and scheduled to open in the summer of 2022. We started this endeavour with the ambition to contribute to a new generation of mental health facilities that were therapeutic, safe, and comforting, for those who suffer from acute mental illness. We remain fully committed to those goals, but the path has proven more complex than we ever imagined at the outset.
The Springfield University Hospital project for the South West London & St George’s Mental Health NHS (SWLSTG) Trust has provided us with the opportunity of modernising this London mental health facility. In the previous issue of this journal, Richard Coe of Kajima Partnerships wrote about the transformation of the grounds of this site, originally known as the Surrey County Pauper Lunatic Asylum, in Tooting Bec, into a neighbourhood of new homes, with refurbished historical structures, community buildings, a care home, a school, and shops. The former agricultural holdings of the former asylum are being converted into a new 32-acre public park, open and available to all for recreation and leisure.
Set to be an exemplar
New inpatient and outpatient facilities will stand at the heart of this development, which we believe will become an exemplar in demonstrating how large health facilities can benefit communities by accelerating transport and S106 (Planning obligations under Section 106 of the Town and Country Planning Act) planning improvements, as well as providing employment, round-the-clock security, and economic activity. With mental health facilities, emotive issues are equally
THE NETWORK | OCTOBER 2020 The Non-Forensic Bedroom elevation.
important; this project signals that anyone and everyone can be directly or indirectly impacted by mental illness; it is a ‘normal’ part of everyday life. Reducing the stigma of mental illness removes barriers and improves outcomes.
It is important to recognise that the projects now under construction at Springfield have benefited from many years of innovative and visionary work before any of the present team has been involved. By the time the SWLSTG Trust advertised the need for a design team for the new facilities in 2011, it had been steadily working on its regeneration plans for several years. The outline masterplan that has shaped the estate regeneration was initiated in 2004 by Urban Strategies Inc, with subsequent detailed input from Patel Taylor Architects, with the planning team being led by Montagu Evans. This masterplan, which still provides the parameters of the estate regeneration at Springfield, was ultimately granted permission on appeal in June 2012. The long and difficult road travelled to make this project a reality speaks volumes about the resistance to placing mental health facilities within communities, compared
with the standard practice of placing them apart, on the periphery, or insulating them within large, gated estates.
RIBA competition brief Our involvement in the project started in June 2011, when we spotted an extraordinary RIBA competition brief, advertised in the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU). This notice landed at a time when our practice was in the process of rebuilding itself in the shadow of the lean years after the 2008 credit crash, which saw the great majority of our museum, residential, and commercial projects disappear. The following is an excerpt from the competition brief: “The Trust is about to embark on the design of its new generation of inpatient facilities to match the requirements of its innovative clinical services, based on the Recovery Model. This means that the new facilities will support and empower service- users, providing an inpatient experience that will encourage them to build on their strengths and return to a valued role in their community as they recover from a period of mental ill-health. “The facilities must therefore
demonstrate how the Trust values its users, 15
©C.F. Møller
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