The £160 million new Cancer Centre at London’s Guy’s Hospital, which is due to open at the south London site in 2016, was topped out last month.
Designed around patient and staff needs to ‘unify world-class cancer treatments and research in an uplifting, non-institutional, and clinically efficient healthcare setting’, the 14-storey building has been arranged into a series of vertically stacked ‘villages’ to make it more manageable for patients. Each ‘village’ addresses a particular patient need, and has been given ‘a unique identity’. There are three treatment villages for Radiotherapy, Chemotherapy, and Outpatients. There is also a Welcome Village with communal spaces on the ground floor, and a private patient unit on the upper four floors.
The Cancer Centre has been designed for Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust by architects Stantec and Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, and is being built by Laing O’Rourke. Arup is providing integrated structural and building services engineering.
The topping out ceremony opened with speeches on the second floor – the location of the radiotherapy treatment (linear accelerator) rooms. Following feedback from patients, the Cancer Centre will be the UK’s first to wholly locate its radiotherapy treatment above ground.
