St Luke's Hospital (formerly), now Woodside Square

St Luke's Hospital had been founded by St Luke's Charity as a successor to its asylum in Old Street. The Charity was established in 1750 to provide treatment for 'poor lunatics', initially opening a hospital in Upper Moorfields. A larger purpose-built hospital was constructed on a new site on Old Street in 1782-87 where it remained until 1917, when the site was sold to the Bank of England. This enabled the hospital authorities to purchase three C19th villas and their gardens on Woodside Avenue: Leawood (now called Simmons House), Roseneath and Norton Lees, the latter built in 1875 for silversmith Harry Atkin. Architect T A Pole drew up designs in 1927 for a new Administration Block between Roseneath and Norton Lees, and the three existing houses were adapted for hospital use in 1928-30, Norton Lees becoming a nurses' home. Pole also designed a series of loggias or covered routes that connected the buildings to treatment blocks to the north of the site. The buildings are sited around a central garden with the loggias traversing the gardens. Mature trees, both deciduous and evergreen, survive around the perimeter of the site, although few (if any) are over 100 years old. Rockwork along the driveway to Norton Lees is probably Victorian. Later landscaping included a more formal garden in front of the Administration Block, including an attractive herringbone brick path. In 1993 a new Special Needs Unit was built as a result of which some of the shrubberies were lost and trees felled at the back of Leawood, although some new planting, including silver birch, has been carried out. The new unit consisted of three homes and provided an intensive rehabilitation service catering for 28 people, some of whom were re-located from Friern Hospital in Barnet when that closed, which is now being developed for private housing as Princess Park Manor (q.v.). New loggias in the same style as the earlier ones were incorporated into the architectural scheme. When St Luke's opened at Woodside Avenue, its aims were to treat a small number of 'educated people of slender means' and it initially housed 50 patients. The approach to treatment echoed that of pioneers in mental health such as Henry Maudsley, who founded the Maudsley Hospital in Camberwell. It was later enlarged to 100 beds when it became a teaching hospital in 1948 as part of the Middlesex Hospital's Department of Psychological Medicine. It later came under the Camden and Islington Mental Health and Social Care Trust, now Camden and Islington NHS Foundation Trust. While parts of the hospital, including the occupational therapy unit, administration office and staff accommodation, remained open, the hospital’s three main acute wards, dining room, Leawood Day hospital and psychiatric intensive care unit closed.

The Board of the Foundation Trust approved a proposal to sell redundant parts of the site in June 2011. Eventually the site was sold and has been redeveloped as Woodside Square, a private housing development.