Work begins on £860m hospital to replace King’s Lynn’s crumbling QEH

Diggers moved on to the car park of the Queen Elizabeth hospital in King’s Lynn on Monday to begin work on its £860m replacement, 11 years after the first ceiling panel fell and six years after the hospital was declared one of the seven in England whose crumbling concrete made rebuilding a national priority.

The new hospital will be built beside the old one on the same site at Gayton Road, with 620 beds, 15 operating theatres and a single-storey emergency department, and is due to open in the spring of 2031. The existing building, which opened in 1980 and was constructed from reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) with a design life of 30 years, will be demolished in 2032.

Until then, the 250,000 people of west Norfolk, south Lincolnshire and the Fens will continue to be treated in a building held up by 4,700 steel props, which stand in corridors, wards and operating theatres. The hospital employs 14 staff whose only job is to inspect the roof. It has closed 32 beds since 2021 because the rooms were deemed unsafe, and in June a theatre was shut for three weeks after a crack was found in a beam above the anaesthetic room.

“I have worked here for 26 years and for the last five I have walked under a prop to get to my desk,” said Alison Fenn, the hospital’s chief nurse. “Staff have been extraordinary about it. Patients have been extraordinary about it. But there is not a person in this building who has not thought about what would happen if the inspectors missed something.”

The hospital trust says the new building will be the first in England designed from the outset around single rooms, with 70% of beds in individual rooms with their own bathroom, and the first to be built using a standardised “hospital 2.0” design that the government hopes will cut costs on later schemes. It will have 1,900 parking spaces, 300 more than now, and a bus interchange that the county council will serve with a direct route from Wisbech, 14 miles away, where the hospital draws a quarter of its patients.

The contractor, a joint venture of two British construction firms, will employ about 1,200 people on site at the peak of works in 2028 and has committed to 90 apprenticeships through the College of West Anglia. The first structure to rise will be a 400-space multistorey car park, due to open next autumn, so that building work can take over the existing surface parking.

Local campaigners, who collected 45,000 signatures for a new hospital, said they would not relax until the first patient was admitted. “We were promised this in 2019, 2020, 2023 and 2024. We have had ministers in hard hats before,” said Maggie Coe, who chairs the Save the QEH campaign. “This time there is a digger. We will be here every month to count the floors.”

The hospital’s roof is inspected every day. The trust says the props will stay until the last patient has been moved across.