What is your role at Maggie’s? I’m very lucky to be chief executive of Maggie’s, but that doesn’t quite describe my role, partly because I was the first employee and partly because my background was in nursing.


I witnessed the first client meeting between Maggie [founder Maggie Keswick Jencks] and Richard Murphy [architect of the first Maggie’s Centre in Edinburgh] and went on to be the client on all the others.


My job has evolved over the years, but because I’ve been here from the very beginning, I’ve stayed close to the things that I feel are most important at Maggie’s.


You knew Maggie Keswick Jencks well – what was her original vision for the centres? She felt you should leave a visit to hospital feeling better than you arrived. But because of the strip lights, the waiting and the lack of views, you often felt worse. With the waiting, the complaint wasn’t so much having to wait,


but about how you waited. It wasn’t necessarily about having access to the outside, but about being able to see outside to something like a garden or a tree.


She also wanted to create somewhere interesting where people would feel welcome and safe, and where they’d want to spend time. Having worked in NHS hospitals, I quickly saw how having a separate Maggie’s centre changed the hierarchy – it was the patients’ place, not the hospital’s.


How important has architecture and design been to realising Maggie’s vision for supportive spaces for people with cancer? Te buildings actually deliver some of the care, by helping the care that the professionals who work in the centres are giving to penetrate in a deeper and more meaningful way. We’ve learnt that it doesn’t take that much to make a difference – even little things like making the windows lower so that you can see out more are important. At Southampton,


Amanda Levete sunk the building down so that there was an acoustic and visual buffer to the car park surrounding the site, and the impact of the garden outside was huge inside the building.


Did you have any experience of working with architects and designers before? What skills have come in handy?


I didn’t know anything about architecture and design – my world in nursing was nothing to do with the design world. But I liked a neat and tidy ward, with comfortable patients. Being a client is about being committed to a project right to the final details at the end.


What is your process for appointing the design team, and has this changed over time? Maggie and Charles Jencks had great friends in architecture who were amazing, and when Maggie died in 1995, many of them wanted to do something in memory of her, so we worked with them [on some of the early centres]. We


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