Lanchester Road Hospital

This specially designed building sits in a beautifully landscaped environment on the outskirts of Durham. The hospital provides modern and spacious accommodation for a range of mental health and learning disability services.

Each of the single, en-suite bedrooms is on the ground floor with a window seat, most of which overlook the surrounding countryside. Each of the wards has its own enclosed garden and each unit includes communal living areas and kitchens.

The light and spacious atrium entrance opens up to a coffee shop and leads into a beautiful central courtyard with seating areas for everyone to enjoy.

Visiting times

Please contact the hospital to ask for individual ward visiting times.

Getting to the hospital

View the hospital location and get directions from Google maps. You can also obtain public transport information from the Traveline website or by calling 0870 608 2680.

Car parking

There are plenty of free car parking spaces available to use at Lanchester Road Hospital. Disabled parking is also available. Car parking on the site, including Appleton House, is monitored by an external company, Excel Parking. Please make sure you park according to the notices displayed in the car park. Cars parked on double yellow lines or in a blue badge area without displaying the badge will be liable to receive a fixed penalty notice of £40.

Bowes Lyon Unit – Visitors using the Bowes Lyon car park must sign in at the Bowes Lyon unit reception.

Wheelchair clinic – Wheelchair clinic parking bays are solely restricted to visitors and patients to this clinic.  Anyone visiting the wheelchair clinic must sign in at its reception.

Coffee shop

This is located by the main entrance and has a pleasant seating area overlooking the landscaped central courtyard. The café is open from 9.00am – 3.00pm, Monday to Friday and offers a range of hot and cold snacks, sandwiches and drinks. Vending machines are available out-of-hours serving snacks and beverages.

Faith centre and chaplaincy service

The faith centre is available to everyone – to service users, carers, visitors and staff and to people of any faith or no particular faith. It is a place where all can come to find a measure of quiet and peace. There are spiritual writings and prayers available. For Muslim users of the faith centre, the direction of the holy city of Mecca is indicated and washing facilities are provided.

The faith centre is also the base for the work of the chaplaincy team at Lanchester Road Hospital. Like the centre itself, chaplains are also available to anyone involved in the life of the trust. Our chaplains can offer, among other things, a listening ear and support, especially at times of crisis or bereavement.They can help you to think things through and make sense of experiences. They can offer a chance to pray and take part in worship, receive sacraments of the church or make contact with a local leader of a person’s faith.

There is a chaplain on call from 8.00am to 8.00pm every day of the year. They can be contacted through a member of staff or by the hospital switchboard.

Caring for the environment

This environmentally friendly building also includes a number of important features:

• the atrium has a sedum sloping roof – the low growing plant which covers the roof helps keep it warm in winter and cool in summer
• rainwater is collected in small tanks and then used for watering garden areas.
• a ground source heating pump, which takes energy from the ground, reduces the need for fossil fuel heating.

Art at Lanchester Road Hospital

Art creates a relaxed and therapeutic environment for service users and more pleasant surroundings for staff and visitors.

Our aim was for art to be an integral part of the hospital. The lead artists were commissioned early in the project and they were involved at key stages of the building and landscape design. We also involved service users and staff in developing and producing the artwork.

Main entrance

The artworks for the front entrance are centred on a number of themes, which were developed at workshops with staff and service users. These themes include the circle of life and healing flower remedies. The resulting designs consist of multiple outlines of healing flowers used to create large flower in a circle. You will find these images on the front glazed entrance and replicated within the circular walls in the large reception atrium.

Faith centre

The faith centre window is in the form of a tree of life, a symbol that often appears in folklore, cultures and fiction. This tree relates to immortality or a can be a symbolic centre of our own mind and creates a calm and relaxing mood to the quiet room within the faith centre.

Department entrance watercolours

The watercolours which adorn the entrances to the adult and learning disability wards, physiotherapy and consulting suites are directly inspired from the discussions and mood boards created by the patients and staff during the workshops. These are handmade and the flash of colour is used to define the entrances along the corridor, linking them with the way finding signage around the building. This theme continues through the adult wards where the entrance watercolours are replicated on the nurses stations.

Central garden seating feature

We have created a specially designed circular pathway and seating area in the central courtyard. Once again, this follows the circle theme with a curved pathway and three curved walls with spiral movement, which is lit up from inside the wall. To compliment this area there are glass rods set between bricks on the external wall of the faith centre, creating a focal point in the garden.

Exhibition walls and ward artworks

Service users took part in workshops and have produced artwork and photos for four large exhibition panels, which will displayed in the central walk way. The displays are not static and will be refreshed at various stages throughout the life of the building.