Health \ Maggie's Cancer Caring Centre, Edinburgh

Our project for the first Maggie's Centre was completed in 1996. An extension was commissioned five years after and completed in 2001.  A second extension was commissioned in 2014 and completed in 2020. So our involvement with the building and the organisation  has therefore stretched over a quarter of a century and we are very proud of what the Maggie's Centre movement has achieved with centres all over the UK and beyond and in our own contribution  at the Western General Hospital. We are the only architect who had Maggie Jencks herself as our client; her vision was for a place cancer sufferers could go to get help and solace as well as access to independent and alternative sources of advice and treatment. Activities range from single and group counselling, beauty therapy, yoga and relaxation but above all the centre is a social meeting place where experiences can be shared.

The original project was to squeeze activities into a small disused stable building at the edge of the hospital site facing north. The first extension doubled the size of the building and extended in two opposite directions simultaneously. A large subdivisible room became the main feature. The second extension provided a bigger kitchen space, a new, large meeting pavilion and more offices. The extensions (neither of which were ever envisaged in advance) have continued to keep the double height space in the centre of the original building  as the centre of the larger building and ensure that there is no dedicated circulation-only space. Architecturally we have developed the extensions in the same language as the original. We also took over some unused open space to create a long garden and garden walk to the east culminating in a garden pavilion to our own design which was completed in 2022.  This is the culmination of our idea to incorporate some unused hospital ground into making a new garden (designed by Emma Keswick) as part of the recent building phase. The path down the garden now terminates in this tiny building which is designed in the same vocabulary as the previous and is to be used for 1:1 consultation, small groups and individual visits. 

Maggie's Cancer Caring Centres website can be found at www.maggiescentres.org