Berthold Lubetkin’s daughter: Save the Finsbury health centre my father designed with love

Published: 5 February 2010
by TOM FOOT

THE daughter of world-famous architect Berthold Lubetkin has made an impassioned plea for her father’s “favourite” building to be saved from closure.

Sasha Lubetkin travelled from her home in Bristol to Islington town hall on Monday to take part in a meeting about the future of Finsbury Health Centre. She said she was “shocked and distressed” to discover NHS Islington was planning to close the Grade I-listed building in Pine Street.

She told a council health scrutiny committee: “I once asked my father: which is your favourite? He said it was Finsbury Health Centre. This was because it was the most complete expression of his profound conviction that architecture should serve the people, and that it should perform the role of improving people’s lives.

“I suspect everyone is familiar with the quotation that is printed on the [health centre] plaque: ‘Nothing is too good for ordinary people.’

“Finsbury Health Centre was the very best my father could make it. He designed it with love and with the most meticulous attention to every tiny detail, making sure it would not only serve the public of the day but that it could be reconfigured to meet the medical needs of the future. I’m sure it could be refurbished and remodelled.”

She added: “I ask the committee to please consider that many people love and value Finsbury Health Centre. 

“The chances that Islington could commission another building as timelessly beautiful, as greatly loved by its users, as much admired all the world over, as flexible and fit for purpose as FHC is, must be vanishingly small. I beg you to consider what you will be losing if you give up that building.”

She then read a letter sent to the Independent newspaper from a Finsbury patient following an article about the health centre in 1990. It recalled the “feeling of pride” shared by patients after it opened in 1937. They lived “in the knowledge that at least someone in authority cared for those who through no fault of their own were on low incomes living in council flats”.

The health centre brought together under one roof for the first time in London a range of health services, including podiatry, dentistry, general practice and physiotherapy in a service free at the point of use. It was a vision that inspired health minister Nye Bevan when founding the NHS a decade later.

But following years of neglect, the centre has fallen into disrepair and now faces closure by its owner, NHS Islington, which claims it is too expensive to refurbish.

The meeting heard that an English Heritage report said “we entirely reject that the building’s listed status prevents modernisation”. The com­­mittee is days away from producing a final report that will be sent to Health Secretary Andy Burnham, who will make a final decision on the building’s future.