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Trevor Morriss, principal at SPPARC, discusses its “heritage-led” adaptive reuse of Modernist icon Ravenscourt Park Hospital into new London housing; and what architects can learn from its guiding principles of fresh air and sunlight, a century on.
D
espite its key role in popularising the Modernist movement in Britain, Ravenscourt Park
Hospital in London’s Hammersmith has sat empty for 20 years and now appears on Historic England’s Heritage at Risk register. Following planning consent for developer TT Group last July, SPPARC’s heritage-led repositioning of the former hospital into 140 residential units and a 65-bed care home will ensure the survival of its architecturally signifi cant Grade II* listed buildings. It will also open the site up to the public for the fi rst time through dedicated community spaces, new pedestrian routes linking to Ravenscourt Park, and a landscaping scheme that refl ects the importance of open space in the original design vision.
As its original name suggests, the Royal Masonic Hospital was commissioned by the Freemasons, to provide low-cost healthcare to its members and their families. For the hospital’s architects (Burnet, Tait & Lorne), it represented a major shift in style for their practice. Despite winning the project in 1929 based on Neo-Georgian proposals, lead architect Thomas S. Tait would later radically redesign his plans in the International Modernist style. With its fl at roofs, horizontal lines and sparse ornamentation, the hospital’s layout and aesthetic exemplifi ed this emerging movement. The campus of four red-brick
WWW.ARCHITECTSDATAFILE.CO.UK SPPARC’s design for two new blocks “are in the spirit of the original masterplan”
buildings – three hospital blocks and one entrance building, are joined by glass bridges in a cross-axial layout. For SPPARC, a practice that has built up a portfolio of major projects and a reputation for reworking some of London’s most signifi cant heritage buildings, it is always a pleasure to work alongside the design ingenuity of historic architecture. On its opening in 1933, praise for the Royal Masonic Hospital was near unanimous. It won both RIBA’s Gold Medal for Building
of the Year in 1933 and the London Architecture Bronze Medal in 1934. A two-page spread in Country Life described the hospital as ‘one of the most successful… contemporary buildings in the country’, while Architects’ Journal hailed it as the architectural event of the year. This widespread acclaim was about more than just aesthetics, however. Hospitals embody prevailing beliefs about healthcare from the time in which they were built. Before they shifted to a focus on minimising
ADF MARCH 2026
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