St Mary’s Hospital is a hospital in Paddington, founded in 1845.
St Mary’s Hospital first opened its doors to patients in 1851, the last of the great voluntary hospitals to be founded.
With the shift towards community healthcare delivered in the early 20th century, partly due to the social medicine revolution, pressure on bed occupancy relaxed, and with the formation of the National Health Service in the 1940s, many of the local hospitals of the St Mary’s teaching hospital group eventually closed and relocated services to the Paddington basin site.
The hospital site incorporates the private Lindo wing where several celebrity and royal births have occurred. The wing is named after Frank Charles Lindo, a businessman and board-member of the hospital, who donated £111,500 before his death in 1938.
The laboratory where Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin has been restored to its cramped condition of 1928 and incorporated into a museum about the discovery and his life and work.
