St George’s Health and Wellbeing Hub
St George’s Health and Wellbeing Hub is a first example of a new model of integrated, community-based care – bringing together eight NHS services under one roof to reduce hospital admissions, shorten wait times, and improve outcomes for patients in the London Borough of Havering.
St George's Health and Wellbeing Hub opened in 2024 as a 5,000 m² facility in the London Borough of Havering, designed and engineered by Bryden Wood for NELFT NHS. The brief was to consolidate eight previously dispersed NHS services – diagnostics, mental health support, renal care, frailty and primary care clinics, cancer services, and an Ageing Well Centre – into a single building, reducing the burden on acute hospital services and improving access for the communities that need them most.
Project details:
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The hub is designed to reduce hospital admissions and wait times by enabling patients to access multiple services in a single visit – care pathways that previously required travel between several sites.
Bryden Wood provided architecture, structural engineering, and civil engineering for the new facility – the first project in which Bryden Wood has delivered a combined architecture and engineering service for the NHS.
The hub brings together services from three NHS trusts – NELFT Diagnostics and Mental Health, Barts NHS Renal Care, and BHRUT NHS Frailty and Primary Care – alongside a GP practice, an Ageing Well Centre, cancer services, and a dementia-friendly garden. By consolidating these services under one roof, the model is designed to reduce hospital admissions and wait times, and to enable care pathways that previously required patients to travel between multiple sites.
Delivering this facility required extensive consultation with multiple NHS stakeholders: Havering Planning and Design offices, the Design Review Panel, and the local community.
The building sits within a sensitive Green Belt setting, and the design responds to these constraints through a carefully considered massing strategy – three interlocking blocks whose connections form the building’s main access points, with terraces throughout offering views across landscaped gardens and towards the Green Belt. Beyond its clinical function, St George’s Health and Wellbeing Hub is designed to serve the broader community: a non-profit café and spaces for local groups extend its role beyond healthcare into everyday neighbourhood life. This reflects Bryden Wood’s approach to healthcare design – buildings that serve clinical purposes and community purposes simultaneously.
It is the first combined architecture and engineering project Bryden Wood has delivered for the NHS, and the project was also shortlisted for the Building Better Healthcare Awards, the HSJ Integrated Care Initiative of the Year, and the Brownfield Awards 2025.
Delivering on a Green Belt site, with three NHS trusts, two planning bodies, and extensive public consultation. That is the complexity Bryden Wood navigated to bring integrated community care to Havering.
