About Us

The Nightingale Project brightens and enlivens the environment for patients and staff of many mental health centres through art and music. The importance of art in hospitals is now increasingly recognised, and many NHS Trusts are taking an interest in the healing environment. There is evidence that people recover and are discharged more quickly in an environment that has been made more attractive and less institutional (see links page), and the Nightingale Project seeks to enact this principle in hospitals and community sites throughout CNWL NHS Foundation Trust.

At South Kensington and Chelsea Mental Health Centre we have arranged more than twenty temporary exhibitions in the Outpatients’ Department (see Past Projects Page), and have commissioned several artists to produce works of art for the inpatient wards. Britain’s leading illustrator Quentin Blake was commissioned to produce a set of drawings for the older adults’ ward (Kershaw Ward) depicting older people enjoying themselves dancing, juggling and swinging from the branches of trees. The most common remark heard from inpatients on these pictures is: “They make me smile!” And in the adult wards, Japanese artists Kaho Kojima and Chisato Tamabayashi created colourful hanging mobiles in the large skylight spaces, which have enlivened previously dull, lifeless corridors.

In the inpatient wards we have hosted live music as diverse as a performance from the brilliant jazz pianist Gwilym Simcock, to a gospel choir, to the British premiere of a cello piece by Mark Anthony Turnage.

At St Charles Hospital in North Kensington, illustrator Paul Cox produced a set of large paintings, and Christopher Corr painted a vibrant series of paintings of the local area for an older adults’ ward, bringing the local area inside the hospital so that inpatients are helped to continue to feel in touch with the world outside hospital.

Quentin Blake has continued to work with us, producing several sets of drawings which are displayed for example at the Gordon Hospital in Pimlico, and Northwick Park Hospital in Harrow. And architect and painter Will Alsop came into one of our wards to conduct a series of workshops in which he and the inpatients co-created a series of large paintings, which now adorn the walls of the ward in which they were made.

In mental health services there is an increasing emphasis on ‘social inclusion’; that is, we aim to enable people with mental health problems not to become marginalised, but to play as full a part in society as possible. One aspect of this work is to ensure that people using mental health services are able to access facilities in the community – that is, to take people out of the mental health unit and into the world. The Nightingale Project adopts the complementary approach of bringing the outside world (in the form of high quality art and music) into the Unit, helping to dissolve the barriers that sometimes seem to exist between service users and other members of the public. In this way we aim to reduce the stigma often associated with mental health problems.

The Nightingale Project’s Directors are Dr Nick Rhodes and Stephen Barnham. Further information on the Project is available from Nick Rhodes – see Contacts page.