WGH Edinburgh

This was one of the first modern buildings I became aware of. It was opened in 1968 as the Nuffield Transplant Surgery Unit. The bridge linked the surgery and radiography departments. Peter Wormesley, a modernist architect based in the Scottish Borders and influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright among others, designed the building.

I suppose it must have lodged in my mind because at that time there was a lot of publicity about the first heart transplant - Dr Christian Barnard and all that. As an impressionable youngster this space age building seemed an impossibly futuristic anomaly in Edinburgh. Somehow I knew it was connected to transplant surgery although I never had to go to this part of the hospital. In fact I've no memory of why I might have been visiting the WGH at all.

Now it is part of the Regional Cancer Centre based at the WGH and unfortunately I had far too many opportunities to visit as I took my wife there for her ultimately unsuccessful chemotherapy treatment.

I still look out for this building and bridge as I pass and despite its involvment in my personal history it still seems an optimisitc statement of intent and deserving of a little more care and attention then it is receiving.


LARGE