St Mary's Hospital, Paddington, London

St Mary's Hospital, (located beside London’s Paddington railway station) was established in 1845,  the last of the great voluntary hospitals to be founded. The original block of St Mary's Hospital in Norfolk Place was designed by Thomas Hopper in the classical style. It first opened its doors to patients in 1851,and quickly established a reputation for research and innovation; it was at St Mary's Hospital that C.R. Alder Wright first synthesized diamorphine in 1874. 

The Clarence Memorial Wing, designed by Sir William Emerson and built with its main frontage on Praed Street, opened in 1904. It was at the hospital that Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928. The private Lindo wing (financed by businessman and hospital board member Frank Charles Lindo), notable for royal births and later ‘celebrity births’, opened in November 1937. Following the 1944 publication of a report by Sir William Goodenough advocating a minimum size for teaching hospitals, and following the formation of the National Health Service in the 1948, several local hospitals became affiliated to St Mary's Hospital. These included Paddington General Hospital, the Samaritan Hospital for Women and the Western Eye Hospital.

Members of the English Rothschild family have supported the hospital over three generations, most notably Anthony Gustav de Rothschild (1887-1961) who, from 1948 to 1956 was Chairman of Board of Governors of St Mary's Hospital. The Anthony de Rothschild Lecture Theatre, at St Mary's Campus, Imperial College School of Medicine in London is named in his honour.

In the 1950s, Felix Eastcott, a consultant surgeon and deputy director of the surgical unit at St Mary's Hospital, carried out pioneering work on carotid endarterectomy designed to reduce the risk of stroke. Paddington General Hospital closed and relocated services to the Paddington basin site in November 1986 and, in common with the other London teaching hospitals who lost their independence at that time, the medical school of St Mary's Hospital merged with that of Imperial College London in 1988. In 1987 as part of on-going rationalisation within the NHS, the hundred year old Paddington Green Children's Hospital was closed down, the listed buildings sold off and its services absorbed into St Mary's.