The Royal Group of Hospitals Arts and Environment Project.

Artistic activity in hospitals throughout the United Kingdom has shown a remarkable increase over the last twenty years. In the mid 1970s the Arts Council, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the Carnegie (UK) trust funded a series of pilot projects. The most notable of these was at St Mary's Hospital in Manchester which expanded to encompass virtually all NHS facilities in the Manchester Area'. In 1990 Peter Senior, pioneer of the Manchester Project and now Director of Arts for Health, reported that 28 health authorities employed an arts co-ordinator and identified more than 300 individual projects 2. A landmark in the development of the new hospital art movement is St Mary's Hospital in the Isle of Wight, where arts provision was integral to the original design of the building.