Inspiring alternative futures for hospitals and neighbourhood health centres with The Hub Fleetwood 

This project mobilizes our research into the futures of hospital design across arts, humanities, and social sciences (Dalton’s philosophical approaches to transforming hospitals, 2021, 2023, 2024; Chabrol’s anthropological approaches to hospitals in Africa, 2019 & 2021; Chalmers, Dalton, and Jacobs’ development of speculative design to imagine hospital futures, 2025; Duffy’s activist approaches to healthcare access, 2024) to impact the design and implementation of future healthcare environments in the North West amid two ongoing government initiatives: the New Hospitals Programme (NHP); and the National Neighbourhood Health Implementation Programme (NNHIP).

To do this we will collaborate with The HUB Fleetwood: a previously abandoned hospital in Fleetwood which has been radically re-imagined as a community centre. This collaboration will bring together academics, clinicians, artists, policymakers, architects, and the public through creative workshops and a public exhibition to test out, together, creative methods for designing future healthcare environments which are inclusive to all, co-created, and empowering. This responds to the NHS’s “10 Year Health Plan” which outlines an NHS in crisis and proposes shifts in infrastructure, moving care from hospitals into the community and altering the ways we inhabit and interact with clinical environments. Our project will demonstrate how the urgency of practical implementation of arts, humanities and social sciences approaches to re-imagine such future healthcare environments, without which we risk repeating the problems of past infrastructure or limiting the creativity with which alternatives are imagined and designed.

Through 3 workshops and an exhibition, we will bring together academics, clinicians, architects, artists, and the public to tell the story of the Fleetwood hospital’s transformation; and activate creative tools for extending the impact of this transformation to influence future healthcare design in the North West and beyond.