In 1933-1934 the Medical College of St Bartholomew's Hospital Trust purchased the site of the former Merchant Taylors' School in Charterhouse Square beside the remains of the medieval Carthusian Monastery. This land was used to re-house the pre-clinical departments, previously in cramped quarters on St Bartholomew’s land.
During the Second World War, the Charterhouse site suffered badly. Most buildings were damaged or destroyed, as well as buildings in Long Row on the Smithfield Site. When the war started, pre-clinical students were evacuated to Queen’s College in Cambridge, while clinical teaching was split between St Bartholomew’s Hospital, Hill End Hospital and St Alban’s and Friern Hospital. The pre-clinical school returned to London in 1946, but the rebuilding of the Charterhouse site was not completed until 1963.
In 1999, Charterhouse was leased to the college after the merger with the School of Medicine and Dentistry. At that time large parts of the site were still as they'd been left by World War II bomb damage. The College's lease requires the land and buildings to be used only for the School of Medicine and Dentistry. At this time, there was some uncertainty around the future of St Bartholomew’s Hospital. However, the hospital was allowed to remain under the decision that the hospital should focus on cancer and cardiac disease.
This allowed the College to invest in the site as the home of the Barts Cancer Institute the William Harvey Research Institute and the Wolfson Institute of Preventative Medicine.
John Vane Science Centre houses research and education facilities for Barts Cancer Institute and William Harvey Research Institute. This includes an endocrinology lab and surgical skills lab to allows students access to state-of-the-art Virtual Reality Surgical Simulators.
The Wolfson Institute of Population Health was formed in August 2021, merging the former Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine (founded in 1991) and the Institute of Population Health Sciences (founded in 2019). The Institute is a part of Queen Mary’s medical faculty, Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry, and delivers internationally recognised research and teaching in population health.
This building provides traditional teaching rooms with a capacity of up to 150. It also contains a lecture theatre and classrooms for smaller conferences, training, and meetings.
This building makes up the entrance of Charterhouse Sqaure, alongside the Lodge House, Dean Rees House and the Old Anatomy Building. These include some of the original buildings of the former St Batholomew’s Hospital Medical College. In particular, the anatomy department.
Barts Pathology Museum houses over 4,000 medical specimens on display over 3 mezzanine levels of the Victorian museum. The museum holds a further 1000 specimens in store along with another 800 that are dedicated to anatomy teaching.
When The London Hospital Medical College and St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College merged in 1995, their collections were merged and moved to this site, where they remain today. It is one of the largest collections of human pathological specimens in the country.
As teaching for medical colleges changed after World War 2, the demand for pathological specimens to study anatomy and pathology declined. By the late 1990's this demand was practically non-existent, and the collection was left untouched for several years.
Grant funding was provided by The Medical College of Saint Bartholomew's Hospital Trustees, a registered charity that promotes and advances medical and dental education and research at Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry, to renovate the collection in 2010. After this conversion, the collection opened to more public engagement and has since become very popular.
The Robin Brook Centre for Medical Education was opened in June 1980, with a capacity of up to 215. It is a traditional building, yet houses modern facilities including seminar rooms, classrooms, and a lecture theatre. This building is mostly used for events connected to St Bartholomew’s Hospital.
The first stone of St Bartholomew’s Hospital on the Whitechapel site was placed in 1752. The East and West Wings were added in 1770 and extended in the 1830s. This site is where the first lectures took place at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, before the medical college was formally inaugurated. However, the original East Wing was destroyed in 2007.