Barts North Wing

The North Wing is the first of the four blocks James Gibbs built at St Bartholomew's Hospital, finished in 1732 and listed Grade I. It was never a ward block. It was the administrative wing, the room where the hospital's money was counted and its benefactors recorded, and the names of more than 3,000 of them are still painted on the walls of the Great Hall. A £9.5 million restoration by the charity Barts Heritage ran from 2023 to September 2025; private hire opened in October 2025, and for most of its 293 years the building had not been open to anyone outside the hospital at all.

Guests arrive through the East Entrance and climb the Hogarth Stair, hung with The Pool of Bethesda and The Good Samaritan. William Hogarth painted them for the hospital in the 1730s and they remain the largest canvases he ever attempted. At the top is the Great Hall, 300 standing or 200 at long tables under a plaster ceiling by Jean Baptiste St Michele, the only work in Britain identified as his. The room was rewired and re-serviced during the restoration, so the lighting, heating and sound now sit inside an interior that otherwise reads exactly as it did in the 1730s.

Beyond the Hall the wing offers the Henry VIII Room for 50 at a reception or 30 at dinner, the Georgian Treasurer's Room for 20, the Guild Room for catering service, and the two James Gibbs rooms on the second floor as green rooms and breakout space. Catering runs through Lettice Events as sole caterer, and production, entertainment and floristry come from an approved supplier list, a condition of working in a Grade I interior. The licence runs to 11pm and every event fee goes back into the building and into Barts Heritage's programme for hospital staff and patients.