Midlands & East Anglia

New medical centre breathes life into old hospital

 Hume Street Medical Centre

The £5 million Hume Street Medical Centre, built on a disused part of the Kidderminster General Hospital site, is almost complete.

The project for a new primary care centre is to replace the premises of the Aylmer Road and Northumberland House surgeries. Planning work on the project began in 2005 with a successful competitive bid by the consortium led by Haven Health properties Ltd and it is due to be completed on 2nd October.

Main contractor on the 3-4 storey building is Wildgoose Construction and the architect is BRP Architects. Alan Sankey, Director of BRP Architects and project architect said:

“The project is extremely complex – the only available suitably located site was occupied by several disused buildings and a staff car park at Kidderminster General Hospital. In order to make the site deliverable we had to demolish 7,000 square metres of redundant hospital building and relocate a 250 space car park. The site slopes significantly and there was insufficient area to satisfy the needs of both our developer client and the Hospital Trust.

“The site is divided into two levels – the upper level which is the primary care centre and its car park turning itself away from the hospital – and the lower level which is the re-provided staff car park for the hospital that sits partly underneath the building as an undercroft and partly in the open air.”

The new building will house two doctor’s surgeries, a pharmacy and a private clinical suite.

Alan told Premier Construction:

“The site is very much an area of transition between Victorian terraces- being traditional and small in scale- and the monolithic blocks forming the rest of the hospital. We have created an environment which tries to respond to the brutish scale of the hospital on the one side, to the more interesting and varied scale of the residential properties on the other and at the same time through the careful consideration of the scale, massing and external wall finishes break the building down into manageable forms and create a strong presence with an identity of it’s own.

“In terms of the design of the building the central entrance is flanked either side by the private suite and pharmacy and leads directly into the heart of the building crossing the light airy axial spine to the combined reception desk of the two GP practices. The waiting areas, off either side, are both top lit by substantial light wells and present themselves to the exterior of the building with full height glazed corners. In some respects we have created a central naturally lit mall with glazed ends and roof running between the two and three storey elements.

“We’re pleased to have been involved in this high profile project and look forward to seeing the facility benefit the local community.”

About the author

Roma Publications