The Spark: shaping the future of children’s healthcare
by Anna Lingard
Marketing Manager
We developed the architectural design for The Spark, working alongside HLM, who led the internal environments. The building brings healthcare, research, and technology together within a welcoming, flexible and highly specialised setting.
Our involvement builds on many years of helping shape Sheffield Olympic Legacy Park, including contributing to the original masterplan and designing and delivering Steel City Stadium. Located at a key gateway into the park, The Spark has been designed as a distinctive landmark that responds to the wider masterplan and its relationship with the neighbouring Attercliffe community.
The building will accommodate flexible clinical and innovative spaces including highly specialised environments for healthcare training and cutting-edge technology testing, simulated home and hospital environments, physiotherapy clinics and specialist gait-analysis facilities.
These spaces will enable clinicians, researchers, academics and industry partners to work together more closely. Flexibility has been central to the architectural response, allowing the building to adapt alongside emerging technologies and changing approaches to children’s healthcare.
Children, young people, families and clinical teams also contributed to the design process, helping shape an environment that balances advanced technology with the need to feel welcoming, reassuring and easy to navigate.
"The completion of The Spark is a hugely significant moment for Sheffield and for the future of children's healthcare. As a locally based practice, it's been rewarding to design a building with such an important purpose on a site we've helped shape over many years. The challenge was bringing together complex clinical, research and technology spaces while creating somewhere that feels welcoming and reassuring for children, young people and families. It's a privilege to work in an industry where the buildings we design have such a direct, positive impact on the communities and people they serve."
Managing Executive Director
Once open, The Spark is expected to support care for more than 200 patients each day while creating new opportunities to develop and test innovations in children’s healthcare.
The development has been delivered by HBC Construction, with funding support from the South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority, Sheffield City Council and Sheffield Children’s Hospital Charity.
We are proud to have contributed to The Spark and look forward to seeing it open its doors later this year.