Turner & Townsend chosen for new Paddington hospital PFI job

Turner & Townsend has been selected to work on resurrected plans to rebuild the St Mary's hopsital in Paddington, west London. The firm beat off a shortlist that included big name rivals Gardiner & Theobald, Davis Langdon and EC Harris to win the commission and will work with architects David Morley and Greenhill Jenner on the project. The shortlisted firms were formally told of the two appointments by the St Mary's NHS Trust this week. The budget for the new PFI scheme is expected to be between £300m and £400m.

The appointment of the new design team follows the collapse of the £1bn Paddington Health Campus project, planned for the St Mary's site, which would have included two other hospitals and premises for Imperial College. This plan was thrown out in the summer, and sparked a highly critical independent review into the running of the project, which was originally conceived in the late 1990s. The botched project also faces an upcoming review by government spending watchdog the National Audit Office.