The Royal Marsden is the UK's leading cancer hospital, with a top-class reputation for treatment and research into the disease. Such is its reputation, it also treats a lot of foreign patients.

It was the first hospital dedicated to the care of cancer, originally founded as the Free Cancer Hospital in 1851 by Dr William Marsden, whose wife had died of the disease. It quickly outgrew its first premises in Westminster and moved to its present site in Fulham Road in 1862. In 1954 the hospital was renamed The Royal Marsden Hospital in honour of its founder.

The hospital is still housed a large red-brick building on the same site. But a second site, at Sutton in Surrey, has been open since 1962.

In 1991 the Royal Marsden became the first NHS hospital to be awarded the Queen’s Award for Technology for its work on drug development, and was recognised as one of six centres of excellence in the Government’s NHS Plan of 2000. In 2004. it became one of the country’s first Foundation Trusts, hospitals that have greater financial freedom to operate within the NHS.

Should the fire require the hospital to be closed for a lengthy period, as seems possible, cancer services in England will be seriously damaged. Many patients are referred there from other less-specialised hospitals for state-of-the-art treatments.

Professor Ray Powles, a specialist in cancers of the blood, said he hoped valuable research material would not be lost as much of it would be at Sutton site, where the Institute of Cancer Research's laboratories are based.

But he said the loss of the hospital would be a “huge, huge step” back for cancer treatment. He said: “I worked at the Royal Marsden all my life.

“It’s unbelievable what would happen if it burnt down. It would be a huge, huge step back for all the patients being treated there, and a huge, huge step back for cancer.

“None of the research would be lost, as we have the second centre in Sutton, but you spend 150 years building up an institution like that Let’s just hope that part of it can still function.”

Royal Marsden Hopsital fire hotline: 02086613839

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