Let’s have new homes and a swimming pool

Published: 9 June, 2011

• ABANDONING category 4 provision for “deadly” pathogen work on the Somers Town site (Commons select committee February 2011) excludes UK Centre for Medical Research and Innovation from “being one of the leading medical research centres in the world” and, therefore, of the need for the separate entities of UCL, Medical Research Council, Wellcome Trust and Cancer Research to carry-on with building at Brill Place. 

As a consequence of this, could they not now seek an alternative way forward?

Cancer Research, in particular, should welcome this opportunity to get out of this mistaken marriage of convenience, whereby its dowry of voluntary funds would dry-up as its identity and known work became lost through assimilation into a management with a chief executive directing the institution as a single workplace.

The new building, covering the entire three- acre site, is incapable of expansion. 

Therefore, if Cancer Research, overcoming the previous named barrier, became wealthier and wanted to expand, it could do so only by displacing someone else.

The Medical Research Council can, as a result of this situation, use its present site of 47-acre to carry out its programme for improvements, and this could be done at a fraction of the £650­million cost of Brill Place.

Pathogen research, of course, must go ahead while bearing in mind comments made at a previous select committee hearing about the USA and Germany which, when facing the same problem of security, had each considered off-shore islands as being the most secure.

Lacking such, the MRC could examine the practicality of building a Science Village for pathogen research and possibly combining a hospital for undiagnosed patients. 

This could be done in conjunction with the World Health Organisation / UN. 

Currently there is no international-dedicated hospital for this purpose.

All this in place, will allow Camden to build on land granted it during British Library negotiations in the 1970s – a swimming pool, houses and open spaces – and contribute to lessening the 10-year gap in life-expectancy between Somers Town and residents of Hampstead, less than two miles away.

ALAN SPENCE 
Bury Place, WC1