The Times

Gordon Brown is back in his home town, Kircaldy, Fife, on Friday to open the latest Maggie's Centre for cancer patients. Good news for all: a new healthcare building, on time, on budget (£1 million) — though it won't cost you the taxpayer a penny (it's self-funded) — and architecture to blow you away. Maggie's consistently commissions buildings not from nicey nicey architects but stellar weirdos such as Frank Gehry and Daniel Libeskind — thereby single-handedly becoming Britain's bravest architectural patron. And it's this small charity, not some megarich bank, not some fancy property developer, and certainly not anything remotely to do with, er, Gordon Brown's Government, that has had the balls to open the first British building by one of the world' s most exciting architects, Zaha Hadid, after years during which we, her adopted country, have shunned her. The point of Maggie's is simple, honed through successive centres built by various architects in the decade since the death of its founder, the landscape architect Maggie Keswick Jencks, who wrote movingly in A View from the Front Line of her experience as a cancer patient in NHS hospitals; how hospital environments say to the patient: “How you feel is unimportant. You are not of value. Fit in with us, not us with you.”