The 850-bed Royal Hallamshire Hospital, opened by the then Prince of Wales in 1978, has become a Sheffield landmark with its central 18-storey concrete structure which is the city’s third highest building after St Paul’s Tower and the University Arts Tower. It is a facility of which the people of Sheffield are rightly proud, but the building of the hospital and its handing-over to the health authorities was by no means plain sailing, as one of the architects involved, our own member Robert Guttridge, explained in his well illustrated presentation to a packed house at Fulwood Sports Club.
The first phase, a three-storey out-patients’ department, was completed in 1971, with what is now the main part of the hospital, designed as three interlinked buildings, following over the next seven years. But the whole thing had been on the drawing board since before World War II. In 1937, a policy was agreed by the boards of the city’s existing infirmary and hospital to build a replacement, and the following year an appeal for £1 million was launched. A prospective site was acquired at Norton, but after all the interested parties became involved it was agreed that a preferred option would be a group of hospitals close to the University medical school.
The development included a new nurses’ home and maternity block for the Jessop Hospital, a radium institute with laboratories, extensions to the Children’s Hospital, a dental hospital supported by a bequest from Charles Clifford and a modern orthopaedic department. Mr J Mansell Jenkinson, a Sheffield architect, collated and defined the conditions on which the scheme would be based to enable an open competition to be held, and a list of prominent architects provided by the RIBA were invited to submit schemes, seven of whom accepted. Due the start of the war, the date for schemes to be submitted was extended to the end of June 1940, during which time one architect had died and another withdrew.
The lead architect, a Mr Pearson of the firm of Adams, Holden and Pearson, arrived late for the first meeting because he was delayed by enemy action. The scheme was then put on hold until after the Second World War. The site planning was determined by two principal considerations, the city council insisting that there should be no direct traffic access from Glossop Road, and the desire of the governors and planning authorities to maintain the two-acre green space in front of the new hospital, bounding Glossop Road.
When construction finally got under way, the main men responsible for the building were Mr John Fletcher, of the Hospital Board, Mr Hugh Wilson, the project architect, and Mr Jack Millar, of the construction firm Taylor Woodrow (Midlands). The first major problem was the stability of the site, with shale on rock which could become unstable when wet. There were two instances of earth collapses during excavation, with lorries being completely buried, although there were no casualties.
On a slightly different level, a building with hundreds of rooms spread over 18 floors meant that even pre-handover ‘snagging’ was a mammoth undertaking. Our speaker explained: “To speed the process I would walk all rooms with pockets full of screws and a screwdriver, replacing missing screws – mainly in door hinges.”
After construction the building suffered settlement in places, leaving cracks which included a drop of between two and a half and three inches in the medical school lobby. Other problems included burst chiller pipes, a generator which blew up and fire alarms being set off and alerting the fire brigade.
Joan Maynard, a prominent Sheffield MP at the time, campaigned for a public enquiry after unions had complained of ‘intolerable working conditions’ with laundry breakdowns, air conditioning problems and a lack of lifts. The lifts and other facilities may have had many ups and down during the intervening years, but as a recent inpatient of the hospital I can confirm that everything now seems to be working like clockwork.
With our club’s aging membership, we should all be grateful to have this world leading amenity on our doorstep, now and in the future.