© Hufton + Crow
A grassy hillock near the carpark was almost the last piece of land left unsealed or undeveloped in the grounds of St James’s Hospital in Leeds. Now the most recent of the Maggie’s Foundation support centres has been completed there on a site measuring roughly 1200 m². However, this did not mean the loss of the last green area, on the contrary: a luxuriant garden now flourishes on top of the three stepped, overlapping roofs of Maggie’s Centre and around the building. First established in the 1990s, this charity, which is named after its founder Maggie Keswick Jencks, has to date built 29 centres in Great Britain, Hong Kong, Japan and Spain. In these aesthetically designed counselling centres – many of them planned by well-known architects – patients who have been diagnosed with cancer receive emotional and practical support.