New Oriel eye health centre breaks ground

Oriel ground breaking ceremony - Left to right: Natalie Forrest (New Hospital Programme) ,  Andrew Dick (Director, UCL Institute of Ophthalmology and Oriel senior responsible officer for IoO),   Alan Thompson,   Dr Martin Kuper,  Lord Markham,  Mervyn Walker (Chair, Moorfields Eye Charity),  Dr Michael Spence,  Fabienne Viala,  Robert Dufton, and   Jon Spence (Moorfields chief operating officer and Moorfields Oriel senior responsible officer)  at the ground-breaking ceremony A special breaking ground celebration has been held today to mark the start of construction to build Oriel, a new integrated UCL-Moorfields Eye Hospital centre for eye care, research and education in Camden. The integrated centre will be the new home to Oriel partners: Moorfields Eye Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, the UCL Institute of Ophthalmology and Moorfields Eye Charity. Bouygues UK are the contractors who will build the centre which is due to open in 2027. The new centre - part of the New Hospital Programme, the biggest hospital building programme in a generation - will harness the expertise of the partners under one roof to enable closer collaborative working between clinicians and researchers. This will speed up delivery of the highest quality treatments and therapies for patients in the UK and globally. Breaking ground is an important construction milestone which publicly marks the start of building work on site. Professor Alan Thompson, Dean of the UCL Faculty of Brain Sciences, said: "Being part of breaking ground really brought home that construction of our new centre is about to start.