Inpatient Environments
The famous Hoover Building in Perivale, north London (left), designed by Wallis, Gilbert and Partners in the 1930s, and the equally iconic De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill (right) were among the striking Art Deco-style buildings Lisa Rodrigues says ‘inspired’ her ‘vision’ for the Hove Polyclinic.
ETHOS STATEMENT
‘He taught me about something called ‘an ethos statement’, which, if you’ve never heard of, I promise makes a huge difference to the end-result’
polyclinic, but on asking the people commissioning the facility what a polyclinic was, I was told: ‘I don’t know, just build us one.’ I took the project seriously, and did lots of research, and got everybody together who would be in this building. This was difficult, since some who worked for the acute Trust were not entirely happy about it not being a like-for-like replacement for the hospital that was closing. Others, in the community Trust, were not keen to get involved with the new facility, because they were ‘very happy where we are, thank you’.
BEAUTIFUL HOSPICE “The hospice was designed and built by separate architects, with a number of associated charities acting in concert as the client. Even though there were many people involved, collectively they were probably the best client of all of us. The hospice worked out beautifully, and is a highly regarded and much- loved building to this day.”
‘NOT POPULAR’ Lisa Rodrigues explained that the polyclinic was to replace a local 100-bedded hospital. She explained: “It wasn’t exactly popular, therefore, to be building this polyclinic, which had no inpatient beds, although it did have a physiotherapy department, X-ray, 10 outpatient clinics, and was a base for district nurses, health visitors, community dentistry, chiropody, psychology, psychotherapy, and ECT. We were therefore expecting people who had never worked together to share the space. The architects were Nightingale Associates, who were fabulous to work with, the specific architect being Brian Graham. It was a meeting of minds. He taught me about something called ‘an ethos statement’, which, if you’ve never heard of, I promise makes a huge difference to the end-result.”
28 THE NETWORK J u l y 2 0 1 5
Having been asked to determine her own ethos statement for the new polyclinic, Lisa Rodrigues set off on her bicycle around the site’s locality to think about this. “While on my bike,” she explained, “I got the feeling, cycling around Hove, that it was very light and airy, and there were a lot of 1930s buildings. That got me thinking about where I grew up in West London, and the beautiful Hoover Building, and I went and visited that. I then went to Bexhill to the De La Warr Pavilion, which is gorgeous, and read about the Peckham Experiment, a facility in south London that sadly closed in the 1950s before its time. It was all about health rather than sickness – for example about eating well, swimming, and learning together, a health, rather than a sickness centre.
LIGHT AND AIRY “Anyway,” she continued, “that was what I thought we should try to achieve, and so the design was going to have an Art Deco, 1930s, light and airy feel, with circular windows in the doors, light wood, linoleum on the floor, and as many curves as we could create. Everything should be light and airy, and fresh and open. So, despite some initially angry neighbours, 18 months later the polyclinic opened, and suddenly we went from nobody wanting us there to locals saying: ‘I told you it was going to work’. The facility is beautiful, still looks wonderful today, and has won many awards. You can tell I am very proud of it. “Serendipitously, in 2006 we had a
merger, and the polyclinic came into the ownership of the Trust I was then leading. It is still a beautiful building today, because, at the time, it was built to be beautiful, and to be flexible. Those are the two key things we need to achieve in any care setting. Meanwhile,” she continued, “they were building the mental hospital as a separate part of the competition, and that did not go so well. I won’t name the architect, but it was not all their fault; the Trust was probably not an easy client. Everybody seemed negative about the hospital during the design phase, and that negativity carried through to completion.” Lisa Rodrigues went on to explain that while with the polyclinic’s design and construction, many different stakeholders
‘worked really well together to provide a multitude of services’, in the mental hospital’s case, ‘where things should have been really easy’ – with one Trust and one service, ‘it seemed difficult to agree on anything’.
LACK OF AGREEMENT She elaborated: “For instance they couldn’t agree on whether it should have single en suite bedrooms, despite this being 1995 and the case for such rooms having been already nationally made. Many of the staff said such rooms couldn’t be made to work, in part because they hadn’t as yet been assured of the increased staffing that would be needed to keep patients safe. There was also debate about whether the toilets should be in the bathrooms, or provided separately, which was never concluded satisfactorily. The project ran out of money, so they had to start trimming, resulting in many of the finishes being changed from
‘It was all about health rather than sickness – for example about eating well, swimming, and learning together, a health, rather than a sickness centre’
The ‘Peckham Experiment’ took place between 1926 and 1950, ‘initially generated by rising public concern over the health of the working class and an increasing interest in preventative social medicine’.
Ewan Munro
www.commons.wikimedia.org CC BY-SA 2.0
Photo courtesy of Brian Hazell/De La Warr Pavilion
Photos courtesy of the Socialist Health Association/The Peckham Experiment/The Pioneer Health Foundation.
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