St Oswald's Hospice: 40 Years of Care in the Heart of Gosforth

On a quiet residential avenue in Gosforth, just a few minutes' walk from the High Street, a hospice has been quietly transforming lives for four decades. St Oswald's Hospice opened its doors in 1986 after years of determined campaigning by local people who believed the North East deserved specialist palliative care. In 2026, it celebrates its 40th anniversary — and its work has never been more important.

How It All Began

The story of St Oswald's starts in the 1970s, when a group of founders began campaigning for a hospice in the region. A public launch appeal in 1982 rallied community support, and four years later the hospice welcomed its first patients on Regent Avenue. Named after Saint Oswald of Northumbria, the seventh-century king who promoted Christianity across the region, the name reflects deep roots in Northumbrian heritage.

What began as a vision for better end-of-life care has grown into one of the most comprehensive hospice services in the country — caring not just for adults, but for children and young adults too.

Adult Inpatient Care

The adult inpatient unit has 15 beds providing pain and symptom control, emergency respite, and end-of-life care. A multidisciplinary team of consultants, nurses, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, social workers, and complementary therapists works together to support each patient. The unit is currently being refurbished with funding from Hospice UK and the Wolfson Foundation.

The Focus on Living Centre

The hospice's day services — known as the Focus on Living Centre — offer a different side of palliative care. Patients attend for the day, enjoying lunch together while accessing treatments including infusions, fatigue management programmes, breathlessness support, exercise sessions, music therapy, and complementary therapies. A new Ambulatory Care Service has also launched, offering patients a more comfortable alternative to hospital visits.

Children's and Young Adults Services

Perhaps the most extraordinary part of St Oswald's work is its care for children and young adults with life-limiting conditions. Eight spacious bedrooms overlook the gardens, with a fully equipped sensory room, accessible outdoor play areas with wheelchair-friendly swings and trampolines, and weekly visits from Clown Doctors and music therapists.

Children stay for residential short breaks of two to four days, receiving 24-hour expert medical care while enjoying activities from arts and crafts to community outings. Communication support is available through Makaton, PECS, and British Sign Language.

For young adults aged 18 to 25, a purpose-built lounge with gaming consoles and media facilities provides a social space, while a new state-of-the-art accommodation block — built at a cost of 1.3 million pounds — focuses on building independence, confidence, and life skills. Activities include accessible surfing, boat trips with WetWheels, and annual residential visits to the Bendrigg Trust activity centre.

The children's service covers a wider catchment than the adult hospice, reaching across Northumberland, Newcastle, Gateshead, North and South Tyneside, Sunderland, Durham City, Chester-le-Street, and Derwentside.

The Lymphoedema Service

St Oswald's runs the largest specialist lymphoedema service in the North East, recognised as a national centre of excellence. The service treats both palliative and non-palliative lymphoedema and lipoedema, with outreach clinics in Blaydon, Shiremoor, and South Tyneside alongside the main service at the hospice.

The Numbers Behind the Care

Every service at St Oswald's is completely free to patients and their families. But providing that care costs over ten million pounds a year to run. While approximately 3.5 million pounds comes from statutory funding through the NHS and local councils, the hospice needs to raise over seven million pounds annually through charitable giving.

To put that in perspective: five pounds covers one patient meal. Twenty pounds provides an hour of nursing care. Thirty-eight pounds supplies a day's oxygen provision. These are the everyday costs that donations, legacies, and fundraising events cover.

The Peter Rabbit Sculpture Trail (Summer 2026)

To mark its 40th anniversary, St Oswald's is bringing a spectacular public art trail to Tyneside. Forty individually decorated Peter Rabbit sculptures — created in partnership with Wild in Art and Penguin Ventures — will be installed across the region from 15 July to 14 September 2026. The trail also celebrates Beatrix Potter's 160th birth anniversary. After the trail ends, the sculptures will be auctioned to raise funds for the hospice. Follow the trail at talesonthetyne.co.uk.

Light Up a Life

Each winter, the hospice's Light Up a Life campaign invites people to remember loved ones. Participants receive a personalised card, a star decoration for their own tree, and a light on the hospice's outdoor Tree of Lights. An online Memory Wall allows families to share photos and memories. The campaign is open to everyone, not just those connected to the hospice.

The Great North Run

St Oswald's fields a team of runners every year in the Great North Run. Each runner is asked to raise 300 pounds — and every place costs the hospice around 150 pounds to secure. Applications for the 2026 Great North Run team are now open.

Blagdon Estate Open Gardens

On 28 June 2026, Lord and Lady Ridley are opening the private grounds of Blagdon Estate for a day in support of St Oswald's — a rare opportunity to explore one of Northumberland's finest private gardens.

The Charity Shops

St Oswald's Hospice Shops are a familiar sight across the North East, with over 20 locations. In Gosforth, the hospice runs two shops on the High Street: a main shop at 189 High Street with a modern boutique feel — clothes, accessories, and curated homewares — and a dedicated bookshop at 181-183 High Street, popular for its children's corner and vinyl records section.

The Gosforth shop was recently refurbished with a collaboration with local illustrator James Dixon of Lines Behind. Both shops are well-curated and regularly restocked — 100 per cent of profits go directly to patient care.

Beyond the High Street, the hospice has also opened The Space in Ouseburn, a flexible venue hosting kilo sales, vintage markets, vinyl fairs, and mending workshops. A bold new concept shop opened in Gateshead in late 2025, spanning 5,000 square feet on West Street.

Volunteering

Over 950 volunteers support St Oswald's across more than 120 different roles — from ward helpers and lymphoedema clinic support to charity shop teams and fundraising. One volunteer, Peter, has been a familiar presence on the adult inpatient unit for over 30 years.

The hospice provides practical training, health and safety induction, individual line managers, and reimburses travel expenses. A Volunteer to Career Programme offers pathways into healthcare careers, with partnerships including Pitman Training for practical internships.

To volunteer at the Gosforth shops, contact Shop Manager Marc Riley at MarcRiley@stoswaldsuk.org or call 0191 284 7298. For other volunteering opportunities, visit stoswaldsuk.org/get-involved.

A Gosforth Institution

St Oswald's is more than a hospice — it is woven into Gosforth's identity. It sits on a residential avenue where neighbours walk past its gardens daily. Its charity shops are a fixture on the High Street. Its volunteers come from streets and estates across the neighbourhood. Children who once waved flags for the hospice at community events have grown up to see their own children receive care there.

As it enters its fifth decade, St Oswald's continues to do what its founders set out to achieve in the 1970s: to make sure that the people of the North East have access to expert, compassionate care when they need it most. And it does it with the support of a community that has never stopped believing in what it does.

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To find out more about St Oswald's Hospice, visit stoswaldsuk.org. To donate, volunteer, or find your nearest charity shop, call 0191 285 0063.