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Stretford Memorial Hospital was built as a private residence known as Basford House for Henry Beecroft Jackson, a retired cotton shipping merchant.[1] Completed in about 1850 in the Italianate style, it was lent by its then owner, James Nuttall, to the British Red Cross for use as an auxiliary hospital during the First World War.[2]
A local trust administered by the Red Cross acquired the building in 1925, and it was adapted to become a maternity hospital, as part of the Local War Memorial Scheme.[3] Ian Curtis of the band Joy Division was born in the hospital in 1956,[4] as was Andy Gibb of the Bee Gees in 1958.[5]
Stretford Memorial joined the National Health Service (NHS) in 1948, the year of the NHS’s foundation,[6][7] and closed in 1983. It was reopened as a geriatric hospital in 1985, and became part of Trafford Healthcare NHS Trust in 1996.[3] The hospital was closed in 2015, and its services transferred to Trafford General HospitalGenerally considered to be the UK's first National Health Service hospital, and the first in the world to offer free healthcare to all.; as at 2024 the building remains vacant and in a very poor state of repair. Plans have been put forward by its current owners, Promenade Estates, to restore at least part of the mansion as the centrepiece of a new housing development.[8]