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Established in 1989, the Alder Centre in Liverpool provides counselling and support services for anyone affected by the loss of a child. The centre is unique within the NHS and serves hundreds of families throughout the country. For the new building, we worked closely with architects AHMM and the Alder Hey Children’s Hospital to develop a private, comforting and modern facility.

Conversations with the centre’s counsellors, users and bereaved parents were a key influence on the design of the £2.1 million building, which consists of a series of rooms configured like a large house. The building is arranged around a large lounge and kitchen area — the ‘heart space’ — from which seven counselling rooms lead, each with its private garden. There is a flexible training room, office and dedicated space for volunteers.
The project was of special importance to AHMM, who have close links with Liverpool, and to the whole team for its social benefit. Elliott Wood fundraised collectively with the consultants and completed the project at cost.

The new Alder Centre was opened in September 2021 by Emma Weaver, who used the organisation’s services when she lost her infant daughter in 2014. She said, “The Alder Centre played a huge part in helping us come to terms with our grief and heartache in the early days after Georgie died.” The building was awarded overall winner at the 2021 European Healthcare Design Awards.

We are structural engineers for the new world-class facilities of the expanded Intensive Care Unit (ICU) and Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. We are working with PM Devereux Architects on behalf of Chelsea and Westminster NHS Foundation Trust to deliver this prestigious and much-needed scheme.

The new extensions to the existing wards will be constructed as additional steel-framed storeys above the front of the building on Fulham Road. The new wards’ facades have been detailed with large, glazed elevations to maximise light ingress and to provide views over London from the new hospital level.

The design has required a full assessment of the load capacity and stability system of the structural elements which support the new extensions. The structural detailing and the logistics of the site works have been carefully developed to minimise the impact and disruption on the public, existing ambulance routes and operational wards in the vicinity of the new extensions.

To create a modern facility on the site of an existing 1970s health centre, this project involved a newly built health centre for Camden and Islington Primary Care Trust. Together with architects, Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, we were awarded this project following a RIBA-sponsored competition in 2002.

The new three-storey building was constructed in reinforced concrete up to the second-floor level and a steel frame was used to form the roof. A reinforced concrete basement also provided a storage area for archiving. The first floor had cantilevers beyond the ground floor by up to 4m. An arrangement of deep beams around the perimeter of the building was used to deal with these cantilevers. The second-floor slab was designed as a transfer structure to support the columns of the steel roof above which did not align in many instances with the structure below. Stability was achieved through concrete cores and shear walls.

The building is founded on piles to deal with the high column loads and the potential movement of the clay soil, caused by numerous trees on the site which had caused significant structural cracking to the previous building that occupied the site.