Medicine and modernity: fifty years of NHS hospital building in Scotland, 1948-1998

Abstract

‘It would be futile for medical science to progress and leave in its wake a dull, unimaginative architecture.’ Thus declaimed a public-sector architect in 1951, encapsulating the mood of excitement and opportunity in the realm of hospital design in the new National Health Service. How justified was that optimism? The Covid-19 pandemic brought the NHS to its highest prominence in National consciousness since its creation in 1948. The NHS has come under increasing scrutiny from politicians and historians in recent decades, with funding, procurement, design and construction of hospital buildings undergoing major reconsideration. Hospital architecture, too, has made headlines with public inquiries into failings in the ventilation systems at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital, Glasgow and the Sick Children’s Hospital, Edinburgh.

While historians have examined the NHS in the context of medicine and politics, few scholars have studied one of the most obvious ways that it impacted the environment: its architecture. Internationally, post-war hospital architecture has become a topic of growing interest and study, but attention has mostly been directed towards the works of a small number of major architectural firms and been focused on English examples. As a result, oft repeated assertions - such as, that no new hospitals were built in the first twenty years of the NHS - have gone unchallenged. Even Vale of Leven Hospital, the first entirely new general hospital to be built by the NHS in Britain, which opened in 1955, has had little scrutiny.

This PhD will redress the balance, establishing a chronology of construction of post-war hospital buildings in Scotland, tracing innovations and continuities, and challenging conceptions about the hospital-building boom of the 1960s. The development of Scottish hospitals will be situated in a broader geographical and temporal context, drawing out the ways in which Scotland differed from England and Wales, but also the cross-currents of ideas both within Britain and internationally. By drawing on archival records and field investigation, this study will evaluate post-war hospital design, examining the collaborative process of design and planning, involving architects and engineers from the public and private sectors, as well as medical professionals and administrators. Consideration will also be given to other influences on design: finance, political policy, social conditions and medical innovations.