Edinburgh, Calder Road, Sighthill Health Centre

The first health centre to be built in this country: an early focus of state-sponsored, research-driven health architecture. Opened by the Secretary of State, James Stuart, on 15 May 1953. The one-and three-storey group is ranged in an informal sqaure around a garden courtyard, and contained at its opening a comprehensive range of NHS services, including general practioners' and dental surgeries, along with school health, child welfare, district nurses' and midwives' accomodation. It is built of precast-concrete blockwork, with foamslag concrete internal walls. The interior was intended to banish the sombre gravity of prewar institutional interiors, with their 'teritary' colour schemes. The upper level is reached by a slender concrete spiral staircase, hailed by the Lancet as 'strikingly bright and gay'; the same journal noted that the bright internal colours 'range through, and sometimes, it seems, beyond the breadth of the rainbow; bu the chocolate hue once revered by hospitals and public houses is nowhere to be found'. (Fig. 4.28).

Information from 'Rebuilding Scotland: The Postwar Vision, 1945-75', (1997).