Inspiring facility fuses a century of change

HEJ editor Jonathan Baillie visited the new PFI facility to discover more about the sizeable new mental healthcare “village”, which was highly commended at the 2010 Building Better Healthcare Awards, from MAAP Architects lead designer and director Raechal Ferguson, and project director at the Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys (TEWV) NHS Foundation Trust John Ord.

Constructed on a 16.15 hectare site some two and a half miles southeast of Middlesbrough’s town centre, and completed in March last year, Roseberry Park is located on brownfield land adjacent to the town’s old St Luke’s Hospital – originally a Victorian asylum built in 1898 at the behest of the Middlesbrough County Borough Council to accommodate 130 patients of each sex. Used to care for mentally unwell people right up until Roseberry Park’s opening in Spring 2010, St Luke’s itself was handsomely equipped from the outset, with facilities including staff cottages, farm buildings, a separate superintendent’s house, a church, a mortuary, and an isolation hospital. The contrastingly modern Roseberry Park facility, which was short-listed for Best Mental Health Design, Best Interior Design, and Best Integration of Visual Art awards at the 2010 Building Better Healthcare Awards, and was subsequently highly commended in the first of the three categories at the awards ceremony in November, is, like St Luke’s, just a stone’s throw from the town’s 1970s-built James Cook University Hospital, a large acute hospital named after the famous navigator, explorer, and cartographer, who was born in nearby Marton. Before looking in more detail at Roseberry Park, it is perhaps worth examining in a little more detail the history of the Victorian asylum it replaces, which, over the years, became a wellknown local landmark; indeed a number of the nursing and other staff now employed at Roseberry Park had worked there for much of their career and witnessed many changes.

Victorian origins