 Forty entries were submitted and the winning design was by Stanley Wayman Milburn (1887-1961), an architect with a special interest in schools and hospitals and who had previously designed 10 hospitals in the north east of England.The architecture of the hospital is "dominated by long, parallel slabs, one eight-storied, the other five-storied.The Prince Charles Hospital in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, completed in 1975, followed a similar design.