St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington shows 30-storey rebuild plan in new consultation

Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust has published new images of a rebuilt St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington. Services would be gathered into a tower of about 30 storeys, and the trust has opened a third round of consultation on the scheme.

Patients and staff are being asked for their views on the designs, as is the wider community. The trust plans to submit a planning application in spring 2027.

What the St Mary’s Hospital redevelopment would include

At the centre of the scheme is an 800-bed teaching hospital that would also house a major trauma centre. It would sit beside an expanded life sciences campus. Bringing services together in one taller block would give the hospital a smaller footprint and free up land to upgrade other parts of the estate.

The latest designs place research facilities inside clinical areas and improve the arrival and drop-off points. They also include flexible space that would let the hospital respond to future emergencies such as a pandemic. Two earlier rounds of consultation have already fed into the plans.

Why the Paddington hospital needs rebuilding

St Mary’s is 175 years old and runs London’s busiest major trauma centre. It is also where Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928. Some of its buildings predate the NHS, which was set up in 1948, and the parts of the site in disrepair need £10 million of repairs every year. Late last year the outpatient building was partly closed after autoclaved aerated concrete was discovered.

Under the government’s New Hospital Programme, the trust’s hospitals sit in the last group due for funding. St Mary’s and the trust’s two other sites are not expected to get government-funded works until the 2040s. Trust leaders want to bring that forward. Their plan is to draw up an application themselves and pair money from the programme with funding from elsewhere, which they believe could deliver a new hospital by 2035. Local MPs and trust leaders met government officials in February, and those talks led to £50 million being approved over three years to speed up the rebuild.

Professor Julian Redhead, the trust’s chief executive, said much of the estate was very old and hard to maintain. He said building failures had become “an increasingly regular occurrence” even though millions are spent on maintenance every year. He called the scheme “a once in a generation opportunity” to build a hospital that meets the needs of patients and staff, and to turn the whole site into a larger life sciences campus that attracts jobs and investment.