Building the NHS: Planning, Public Opinion and Britain’s New State Hospitals, 1945 – 1974 (360G-Wellcome-212776_Z_18_Z)

My PhD will investigate the planning and design of new state hospitals in the years immediately preceding the NHS and during its early years. Although well recognised as a formative period for the service, there has been little rigorous research into exactly how health policy functioned in practice during this time. Impressions in both public discourse and scholarship have instead been shaped by the rhetoric of high political figures and senior civil servants who have emphasised the benign, technical, and rational aspects of decision-making. This PhD project will argue a new approach is required. Through a series of four hospital-based case studies of planning and design, it will evidence the power of local opposition and support, comparatively illustrate the persistent inequalities in healthcare, and will uncover forgotten discourses on the future of the NHS. It will restore the cultural, local, and discursive processes that really determined the progress and delay of health policy. Moreover, It will explain why both policymakers and historians alike have sub/consciously favored narratives of objectivity over a broader reading of local and regional sources. My ultimate goal in doing so is to evidence how the NHS was really built and its meaning created.