HEALTH Maggie’s Southampton > © Hufton & Crow
THE OF
architecture
HEALTH
Anyone who has spent time anxiously waiting in a tired, old and drab NHS hospital corridor, a windowless treatment room or even in a harshly-lit onsite café could be forgiven for thinking that the physical building has no role to play in the treatment of ill health that goes on within it. And yet we do not need to go too far back in time to revisit the beautifully light and airy sanatoriums, or the 19th-century mental asylums that were designed with staggered wings and extensive landscaping to see that there was a time when the building, the actual physical environment, was viewed as being absolutely central to the medical treatments within. At Maggie’s, the architecture of a building is central to their philosophy - everyone’s home for cancer care! As a charity whose mission is to provide free cancer support and information in centres across the UK, they are passionate about the importance that good design plays in wellbeing. Each centre is based on an NHS hospital site, and are built in partnership with the clinical cancer teams within the hospital who see, and want to support, the need for broader, holistic and far reaching cancer care strategies that go beyond that which the NHS can offer. Maggie Keswick Jencks was a garden designer, writer and artist, and was married to Charles Jencks, an American cultural theorist, landscape designer and architectural historian. They were in Scotland in 1993 when Maggie, at the age of fifty two, was told that the cancer from which she had recovered five years earlier had returned, and was terminal. Maggie was given this news by an overworked doctor, one we all might recognise if we’ve spent time within our wonderful, yet historically hugely under-funded hospitals, and was left to process the enormity of it in a windowless corridor. It is absolutely telling that despite the shock of the news they’d been given Maggie and Charles found themselves talking about the ‘need for somewhere ‘better’ for people with cancer to go, outside of but nearby to the hospital’, and so the idea behind the Maggie’s was born.
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