THEY rode 26 horses in the central London drawing-room of architect Seth Stein and his wife Dorothy, a film producer. That was when their home, a derelict builder’s yard when they bought it two years ago, was used for stables. Now the only evidence of the horses are the original 1880s numbered tiles in their dining-room, denoting where they hung the animals’ tack, and the paddock-sized rooms.

You enter through massive gliding James Bond-type electronic gates opening on to a cobbled yard. Then you go into their awesome house through a door surrounded by frosted glass. Nearly everything there, from every wall to each step of floor, is new – and mostly designed by Seth. Once inside you are immediately greeted by a concrete cylinder containing a cloakroom. Inside, a font-like marble basin floats out of the wall and tepid water, triggered by the light, pours from a steel tube. It’s so minimalist there isn’t any soap.

A 100ft corridor containing just one picture, and called The Gallery, leads to the drawing-room. Like most of the house, The Gallery has a heated concrete floor and ivory walls. Embedded in the floor are amethysts from a hippie shop in Soho. ‘It’s feng shui to purify the negative energy created by the drains,’ explains Seth, in architect’s uniform of black jacket and white polo neck. ‘But it also tells you where the drains are if you have to dig them up.’ On one side of The Gallery a skin of glass runs from floor to ceiling, flanking the courtyard which was formerly full of building materials. On its other side is the erstwhile workshop, now the kitchen. ‘Instead of net curtains, we’ve planted a wispy strip of bamboo to screen the view,’ says Seth.

The courtyard, paved with Spanish limestone, is Japanese-looking and has two huge Tuscan olive pots, eucalyptus tree, stone block bench and steps to a roof deck. This is where Caleb Joe, their one year-old son, plays. ‘I prefer the urban idea of playing on the roof of an apartment building among chimneys and slates to boring old hills and trees,’ says Seth. Into the drawing-room. Here we stand in natural light under a precisely engineered glazed canopy on a refined-steel truss which replaced the collapsed Victorian glass roof. The cantilevered stairs with American oak steps curve through the room, sculptural and fluid, wrapping round the edge of the wall.

On one wall is a Mark Francis oil of mushroom spores. On another is a fire designed by Seth with a Portland stone square opening and a grate of raised steel studs supporting ‘coals’, in the shapes of spheres, cubes and cones. At night there are dramatic floodlights from the ceiling and a French 1950s black metal Anglepoise light.

The room, like everything in their house, is simple. ‘It’s my antidote to sitting in traffic in the Marylebone Road.’ The furniture, too, is sparse: there’s only a tapering red square steel table designed by Seth, a yellow curvy Bonetti and Garouste sofa, and a green Jasper Morrison chair. They’re waiting for some hip Marc Newson chairs. ‘The idea is that the furniture is sculptural as well as functional. Marc’s chairs are probably not even very comfortable.’

Next door is the dining-room with its Jean Prouve reconditioned 1950s school chairs on early hi-tech frames, a table of old oak floorboards on a stainless steel base and a chandelier made of Christmas lights and crystal – both designed by Seth.

There is also a Christian Boltanski photograph of Memories. But where are their family memories? ‘There are clutter zones in the kitchen and study.’ Certainly the study is plush, nocturnal and cosy – despite having grey waxed plaster walls and warehouse decking shelves – and houses their photographs and books.

The kitchen is 45ft long. Seth might call this ‘the dumping ground’, but the space is pure and functional. There are two long counters, one with a screen to hide the toaster and Squeezy bottle. ‘We sat 60 people here for a friend’s celebration lunch which coincidentally christened the house,’ says Seth.

UPSTAIRS are the original Victorian stable bedrooms with sash windows, now updated with oatmeal sisal carpet and calico canvas blinds. One bedroom has original timber pine trusses. Instead of a bedside table, it has a low stone shelf. A ceremonial garment from Zaire decorates the bed and nearby is Eileen Grey’s Bibendum chair. The cupboards are behind flush panels of varying shapes and sizes ‘to reflect their contents’, punctuated by a deeply recessed modern fireplace.

The bathroom is entered through a dramatic 16ft-high gap without a door. ‘This is a semi-recreational space. Bathing is not necessarily something you have to do behind closed doors.’ There is a stone trough basin and bath which is very simple (you cannot see the plug or taps unless you’re lying in it), all surrounded by Tuscan limestone.

The lavatory is hidden behind a panel and the separate shower is a curved form finished simply in cement render.

He wanted his home to be elegant. On all counts he has succeeded.

How to get the look BARBARA CHANDLER LESS is more in a minimalist household. However, the less you have, the better it must be. Proportion, space, light and materials are of the essence. If possible, use an architect.

The Clients Advisory Service at the Royal Institute of British Architects (0171 580 5533) will listen to your needs (including budget restrictions), and recommend architects. A leaflet gives details. Seth Stein Architects is on 0171 376 0005.

Underfloor heating is back in fashion with problems of 20 years ago sorted out. Plastic (polybutylene) pipes carry hot water through a concrete screed, which can be left as is, or given a variety of finishes, even wood or carpet. Expert system designer/supplier is Kampmann (0181 783 0033), who assesses and supply kits of pipes, pump, mixing valve and controls. Floor temperature must not exceed 27C. They’ll recommend installers. The system is only suitable for newly-built properties, or major conversions if you are raising the floor’s surface.

Floor paint is a cheap and effective minimalist finish. The International range has 10 colours including Granite Grey, Jet Black and White. It costs around £7.30 a litre from DIY Superstores (including B&Q, Homebase); a litre covers around 10 sq m.

Wax walls have a sensuous smooth finish in various colours, including pinks and grey, which you can leave as is. Before waxing let the plaster dry out for around six weeks – it contains a lot of water. The colour will lighten. Then seal with a coat shellac sanding sealer. Apply wax with very fine wire wool – grade 0000. Buff up later to a sheen with a soft lint-free cloth.

The Black Bison range by Liberon (leaflet from 017973 67555) is made from carnauba, which dries hard, unlike soft beeswax. The 13 shades include a neutral bleach finish, into which you could mix earth pigments. London stockist is Foxell and James, 57 Farringdon Road, EC1 (0171 405 2487). Wax to cover around 10 sq m costs around £10, plus £7 for sealer. Pleated Roman blinds are made by Three Mice Blinds in unbleached cotton duck. You can order similar through Bellhouse and Co, 33 Kensington Park Road, W11 (0171 221 0187).

Taps are the classic Arne Jacobsen Vola range, designed in Denmark 30 years ago. Buy them in chrome or colours from Aston-Matthews, Essex Road, N1 (0171 226 7220). To see minimalist baths and basins visit C P Hart, Newnham Terrace, SE1 (0171 902 1000). They’ll send a free catalogue (normally £3) of baths by Jasper Morrison and basins by Philippe Starck.

Aram Designs of Covent Graden (0171 240 3933), famous for furniture classics, hold exclusive world rights on 25 designs by Eileen Gray (1879-1976). The Bibendum, upholstered in leather is £1873.

Fireplaces can be installed by Real Flame, 80 New King’s Road, SW6 (0171 731 5025), using a new system of stainless-steel powered flues, with electric fans on the roof. The spiky grate, nicknamed The Hedgehog, was made specially.

Flues, which can be exposed or hidden, can run vertically or horizontally to any outside wall with no need for a chimney.

FLIGHT Lieutenant John Nichol reckons he had a very good war. Yes, his battered face was paraded on Iraqi television at the beginning of the Gulf War after he and John Peters were shot down over the desert and tortured for three days. And he was used as a human shield, imprisoned in an interrogation centre for seven weeks, subjected to mock executions, bombings, burnings, whippings and beatings. And he suffers still from flashbacks and post-traumatic stress disorder. Then in March he is to be made redundant in the wake of defence cuts. But he says he wouldn’t change a thing.

He is, you see, still enjoying the spoils of war. It is because of the Gulf that this week sees him finishing his first novel, Point of Impact, which, he says, is ‘based on real-life events in the RAF, but not about flying’.

Written in his spare time and in the four months that military personnel receive at the end of their careers to learn to be civvies, the novel is one of three he’s been signed up for by Hodder and Stoughton. ‘The other two were sold without a synopsis,” he reveals, “I started to write as a result of the Gulf, after Tornado Down [an account of the Gulf ordeal, co-written with John Peters] became a bestseller.

‘I’m used to deadlines, being under pressure, being told what to do, left for a long time to do it and having the ultimate responsibility of, you know, possibly killing somebody,’ he continues. ‘But this is scary. I’ve never before signed a contract for money and works of fiction.’ The books are not the only spin-off of his war. On Sunday John appears in Eamonn Matthews’s excellent new blockbuster television series on the Gulf War. ‘It’s brilliant. It shows that there’s only one certainty in war – that people will die. There are no winners and losers.’

Since the Gulf, John has also met Baroness Thatcher, General Norman Schwarzkopf and the Princess of Wales. (‘Princess Diana presented me with a bloody awful Crimplene tie.’) He’s been in demand as a lecturer, after-dinner and motivational speaker for companies. (‘In the Air Force you compete with other air forces, nations, people in your own squadron and yourself.’) He’s been flown worldwide to stay in luxurious hotels by post-Gulf contacts. And he’s contributed to television and radio on a variety of subjects. Oh, and the film rights to Tornado Down were recently sold.

SITTING in the Royal York Hotel, John speaks in a Geordie accent at the speed of machine-gun fire. Wearing a green jacket and grey polo shirt, he’s handsome, beefy and 6ft tall. ‘I’ve worn a uniform for 15 years. Now I have to buy clothes,’ he laughs. ‘It’s simple things like that, and getting a doctor and learning how to do job interviews, that you have to come to terms with when you’re crossing into Civvy Street. In the military we’re used to ordering people ‘Do this for me’ and it will be done.’

John is convivial, extrovert and adventurous. He bears the scar from an Iraqi boot kick on his face and has a prominent bump on his forehead. The lastis the result of his first encounter with death. ‘I was fishing, aged 10, and fell down the cliff and landed on my head. I didn’t fall far, just 20 or 30ft.’

He was brought up in North Shields in a house on a council estate in which his parents still live. They didn’t have a telephone until he was 14 years old. But, the youngest of four children, he had a cosseted childhood. ‘I was the baby and consequently got more than the others. I went on two skiing holidays when I was 13 years old. My parents had never even been abroad until they came to meet me coming home from the Gulf. My mother never worked and was always at home.’

It was a Catholic family – his parents have gone to church daily since his father retired – and John was an altar boy for seven years. ‘I’m lapsed now but I still believe in God. In your darkest times in captivity you pray and make all sorts of promises that you’ll go back to church. Of course you don’t.’

He went to St Cuthbert’s grammar school and left, aged 16, with nine O-levels. It had never occurred to him to join the RAF: he’d never even played at pilots. He wanted to be an electronics technician. ‘By chance I read an RAF brochure to stop myself being bored on a bus journey. Three hours later I’d signed on the dotted line.’

He recalls his time in the Gulf. ‘Once when we were attacked by stealth bombers the ceiling came down and I said ‘Right, I’m going to die now’. It’s quite calming knowing there’s nothing you can do about it.’ Another time a guard put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.

In his flashbacks he relives his loneliness and vulnerability. ‘Pain hurts but you get over it. But you can’t imagine the fear and isolation. You didn’t sleep much because of the bombing and people screaming all around you. Every night nearly all 30-odd of us had the same dream – that we were back at base drinking and our capture had been a dream.’

Five years on, John still views life from an altered perspective. ‘The Gulf taught me that something good will always come out of smething bad and that there’s always somebody worse off than you. The things I thought were important aren’t. I’ve become less argumentative but more impatient as a result of watching my life ebb before me 24 hours a day and having no control over it. I no longer worry about money and see no point in putting it in a bank. When you come back after an experience like that you live your life today as though you were going to die tomorrow. ‘

Since the Gulf, John has been deployed to Bosnia (‘When your aircraft alarm tells you a surface-to-air missile is locked on to you, it’s totally terrifying’), the Falklands, Cyprus and Canada. But now he’s taken voluntary redundancy. ‘With the cutbacks there were no more opportunities for me.’ He has a pay-off, before tax, of four times his annual £30,000 salary. ‘But I’m a real candidate for ending up on the streets. People a thousand times more capable than I have ended up in the doldrums. It’s the most frightening thing I’ve ever done.’

FIRST there was Penny Hughes, Coca-Cola’s 35-year-old UK president who, newly pregnant, decided that motherhood was the real thing and abandoned her position and £250,000 salary.

Now the glossy magazine editors – the prototype You Can Have It All And More women – are, in the gleeful eyes of Tabloid Man, succumbing to the pressures of running home and magazine, getting their priorities straight and chucking in the latter for the former or, at least, for lower-paid freedom.

On Saturday Amanda Evans, editor of Homes and Gardens, quit for her home and garden. The week before, Linda Kelsey, the original Cosmo woman turned editor of She (the magazine to reclaim motherhood and help women juggle their lives), left, suffering from stress and wanting to spend more time with her son. And remember the recent exodus of five other female editors from National Magazine, publisher of Harpers & Queen to Good Housekeeping? You could imagine the babes at Conde Nast, publisher of Vogue, Tatler and House and Gardens, cocking a snook and nappy at their National Magazine competitors. Instead, shivers have gone down their well-bred spines at the misogynist cries of ‘told you so’ and ‘you can’t run a company/magazine and raise a child’ in the Press.

Don’t you know, ask the Conde Nast girls, that Annie Holcroft, publishing director of Vanity Fair, brings her kids to the office? They watch Wombles videos while she negotiates million-dollar deals and sews name tags in their clothes. And that Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman has an eight-month-old baby, a 12-year-old live-in stepdaughter and husband and the most glamorous job in the universe?

ALEXANDRA, 37, has Mother Earth’s long hair and ample breasts, Mama Nature’s clean face, grey cashmere jumper and high snakeskin shoes. The walls of her voluminous turquoise and peppermint office display not photographs of Linda and Naomi, but of her son, Sam. She is clever, she is successful. And she’s paid, partly, to meet glamorous people, to party, wear heavenly clothes and receive bucketloads of flowers. ‘Some days I think ‘having it all’ means that I am so lucky. Other days I think it means, ‘why have I got all this dumped on me?” laughs Alexandra, who was up at 5am with Sam. Does she think she’s good at her job? She pauses. ‘Sometimes.’ But her job is stressful. ‘I have to be available for people to talk to constantly, which is draining. Responsibility is stressful, as is travelling two and a half months a year, and trying to pack everything in so as to have time with Sam.” Alexandra says her husband Paul (writer Paul Spike) is probably the one who gets it when she gets home.

‘I sympathise with what I’ve read about Linda Kelsey,’ she continues. ‘I’ve been severely anxious twice in my life. Suddenly everything becomes too much and you decide to take time out. I’ve now learnt breathing techniques and how to notice when things are seriously pretty difficult. But I get terrible pressure headaches. Lavender oil and Rescue Remedy are very good.’ She crosses her arms self-protectively.

She believes the idea that women work because they want to have it all is a fallacy. ‘You work because you’re paying bills. That’s what most married women with children here are doing.’ Alexandra employs a daily, gardener, nanny and laundry woman. ‘Practically my whole salary goes on paying for help and my share of the mortgage. The nanny has more money to throw around, by far, than myself.’

That salary, it should be said, is not your average London career girl’s. ‘It’s under six figures!’ she protests. Paul also pays for the upkeep of his two children by a previous marriage. Alexandra took four and a half months’ maternity leave. ‘I looked after Sam non-stop and spent most of the time breast-feeding. The rest of the time I spent solidly trying to find a nanny. I interviewed millions of people.’

What were her feelings about work while she was on leave? ‘Sometimes I thought I wouldn’t be able to deal with coming back. I thought I’d miss Sam and be unable to do the job. On leave you become quite unconfident. But the transition was easier than I thought and ultimately I don’t have any desire to be at home on my own with a baby day after day. I’d become bored, unconfident and depressed.’

She was raised by a working mother, the etiquette writer Drusilla Beyfus. ‘I was brought up by the person I’m now becoming, only she was better organised. So I know exactly what it’s like having a working mother. Until I was about seven my mother didn’t have much to do with me. She had a nanny at weekends and nights and lots of other staff. I suspect that as a baby my relationship with her was not as it should be.’

BEING a working mother is difficult. ‘We’ve got it wrong in many ways. It’s not really feasible for women to work incredibly hard, be good mothers, lovers, wives, housekeepers. The more we try to do, the worse it is for us. The whole question of men and women’s roles in the partnership is something that hasn’t caught up with such developments. There is no other area in your life so unclearly defined.’ Sometimes, ‘like everybody’, she feels desperate to quit work. ‘A lot of the time I’d like a peaceful life. Peace of mind is hard to come by when you’re rushing so much of the time. Probably all of us have looked at more flexible, alternative, freelance or whatever ways of working. But money plays a great role in that. I’ve never been career-orientated. But I’ve always been motivated by the desire to earn money.’

FORMER Londoner Adrienne Campbell, 34, eats food foraged from hedgerows, teaches her children at home, has just created a new local currency for her Sussex village, boycotts supermarkets, won’t vaccinate her children, changed her name from Katy when she felt she’d outgrown it, was celibate for two years, has spiritual revelations and gave birth underwater at home in front of her children and the au pair.

Hers is an unusual life, and very unusual for someone educated at Francis Holland, a smart private London school. She was raised by her international businessman father and nicely bred stepmother among their friends like David Niven, Sean Connery and multi-millionaire entrepreneurs. She also gained a scholarship to America’s leading science university, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where, aged 19, she wrote a paper on cancer (with a professor from Harvard and another from MIT). Then she became a journalist on The Economist.

But first the currency. Adrienne, who lives near Wadhurst, has created a currency called Wads with 10 other community-minded souls. “One Wad equals a pound,” she says. “If I want to buy someone’s honey I’ll pay him a cheque in Wads, he banks that cheque at the wholefood shop and uses the credit to buy something locally. It’s a centralised bartering system whereby people exchange goods and services without having to do so directly with one another. If I have masses of herbs I can exchange them for baby-sitting or plumbing.”

The currency is useful for people short of cash and encourages villagers to develop skills and get to know one another. “Such systems are flourishing in England. More than 200 of them have started over the past five years.” She smiles and takes a sip of her peppermint tea.

SHE has also embarked upon another singular project. In January, Adrienne and two other families started a unique school in her sitting-room. It has eight children from the ages of five to eight whom she intends to educate until school-leaving age. The National Curriculum is followed loosely. But the emphasis is on freedom and nature (“The children can tell what animals have been through the hedges by the footprints and stool”) and fees are £600 a term. She hopes for a government grant and to offer an alternative to the state system. The idea came to her after her five-year-old daughter Sophie had spent a year at the village school.

“She didn’t like having to do maths when she wanted to read, or art when she felt like writing.” Adrienne was disillusioned by the state and private systems, the more so after studying the pioneering work of Satish Kumar, a visionary in Dorset. “Children educated privately are pushed academically too early on. Also I believe in respecting children’s choices.” Her school is a non profit-making, parent-run co-operative. “A parent who is a paid teacher teaches in the morning and the other parents teach for free in the afternoons.”

The latter don’t have formal qualifications. “The parent is the best qualified to teach the child. Studies show that home-educated children are two or three years ahead of school ones if they go back into the system.” She says her pupils are happy, uncompetitive, motivated and respectful. We’re sitting in the exquisite setting of her garden, next to wild flowers and her 25-year-old Citron. Here she lives with her three daughters (aged one to five) and composer husband, Dirk, in a 100-year-old oast house with round rooms. She has a beautiful equine face, speaks purposefully and slowly, and wears jeans and scraped-back hair. Her body is relaxed. Her first life-changing experience came on holiday in Turkey in 1982. “I had a spiritual revelation. I can’t explain it more.” On returning, she joined Subud, a cross-denominational religious movement. “Twice a week we do spiritual exercises. It’s like tapping into a divine life force.” She met Dirk through Subud. “We’d both been celibate because we kept making the wrong choices with the opposite sex.

“It was instant recognition. We got engaged after two weeks.” From there her lifestyle took more and more alternative turns. Take childbirth. “My mother had died in childbirth, having twins, so I thought through very carefully how I wanted to do it.”

Her first born, Sophie, was delivered underwater, without painkillers and with Dirk in the birthing pool. She didn’t have a choice with her next, Anna, who was born prematurely. She decided to have her third baby at home. TWO midwives and the children were present at the birth. “They sat cuddled up on the sofa next to Dirk and the au pair. I was screaming and grunting and Sophie was pretty disgusted with the blood.” Wasn’t that damaging and traumatic?

“Possibly. But I think it helped the girls bond with Rose and see that birth is a normal part of everyday life.” Wasn’t it voyeuristic? “Possibly. But I think the pros outweighed the cons.”

The family rarely visits a doctor. “I’ll only go for a diagnosis in order to find out whether the illness is infectious and what the long-term effect will be.’ She relies instead on herbal remedies, homeopathy, eating healthily and fasting once a year during Lent. “We eat a lot of salads made from weeds, wild flowers and hedgerow herbs.”

Adrienne decided not to vaccinate her children against anything. “I read extensively and felt the risks were greater than the benefits. The well-documented hazards of vaccine are brain damage, convulsions, a damaged immune system and death.” She looks at her feet.

Her attitude to personal hygiene is alternative as well. She didn’t wash her children’s hair for two years and now washes it only occasionally. “I have friends who spend six weeks letting the gunk out – you have to wear a hat because it’s so disgusting – and, after that, you have lovely shiny hair.”

ANNA Gonta has been in labour at Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea Hospital since 5am. It’s now 10am. Her baby’s heart is fluctuating. Anna, who’s had an epidural, says she doesn’t feel any pain. But Arthur, her husband, clutches his stomach. ‘I feel pain here,’ he says. ‘I didn’t have this with the first one.’ Anna smiles weakly.

Now it’s 2pm. Anna, pushing and moaning, looks anguished. ‘The baby’s getting tired and distressed,’ says the midwife, in a plastic apron. The baby is in a difficult position, with its head facing upwards. Suddenly its head starts to appear. The midwife performs an episiotomy, cutting the perineum, but the cord is wound tightly round the baby’s neck. A bell is rung frantically.

Suddenly there are eight of us in the room. The baby’s heart rate is low, its breathing poor, its face blue-grey. It doesn’t cry. It’s not responding. It looks dead. The paediatrician rushes the baby over to a resuscitating unit, giving it oxygen, massaging it. A short time later the baby is well, pink and crying happily.

Next door Lindsay Bull is having an easier time. She’s had no pain relief. ‘Good girl, keep it coming,’ coaxes midwife Fiona Allison. Her husband sprays Lindsay’s face with Evian. Now she’s kneeling and wailing. Now pursing her lips. ‘Put your hand down and see what’s there,’ says Fiona. The baby’s head. ‘Oh my God,’ says Lindsay. The baby, her first, is born after just four hours. What are they going to call him? ‘Bradley?’ Lindsay replies, quizzically. ‘Er, all right then,’ says her husband, blankly. Queen Charlotte’s and Chelsea Hospital (QCCH) is one of the world’s foremost maternity hospitals, a place of pioneering research and a centre of excellence, which has trained a third of the country’s consultant obstetricians and gynaecologists. And where they delivered the progeny of Patricia Hodge, Cilla Black, Karen Keating and the Aga Khan. But it’s also a hospital with an uncertain future – of not knowing whether it will be merged with Chelsea and Westminster or relocated to the Hammersmith. The problem is, of course, money.

In 1990 QCCH had a deficit of £1.5 million and faced closure because the governing body was unable to finance its relocation. Now the Hammersmith Hospital NHS Trust – of which QCCH is part – has a deficit of £8.5 million. The redoubtable Bunty Lewis, immaculately dressed and coiffured, looks as if she could run the hospital single-handed. Instead, she administers the appeal office on a full-time but voluntary basis. ‘I probably subsidise it a bit,’ she admits. She resurrected Queen Charlotte’s Birthday Ball and runs a ‘Babies’ Bawl’ children’s tea party for 300, raising £600,000 in six years for research and equipment. But hospitals should not rely on Bunties’ and debs’ photo-calls for funds.

We visit the Special Care Baby Unit – pronounced ‘Scibu’ in nursespeak. ‘Hands must be washed on entering and leaving unit,’ warns one sign. ‘Switch off all mobile telephones,’ alerts another. Kylie Ross, wearing floral dress and mournful expression, strokes 2lb Bailey’s back. Her baby is attached to tubes and breathing apparatus.

Joanne Tucker sits between incubators containing her two seven-week-old babies. She had given birth to triplets. ‘The third passed away after 14 days,’ she says. Now Joseph is 3lb 7oz and George five ounces lighter. ‘They’re my first but not my last,’ she confides. ‘Never again,’ stage whispers Joanne’s mother, Daisy Webster, joking. ‘I’m getting her sterilised.’

Nearby is the neo-natal ward. Here newsreader Pamela Armstrong’s son, AJ, lay 18 months ago. ‘When my baby was born, he wasn’t breathing and he didn’t have a heartbeat,’ says Pamela. He was rushed into a nuclear resonance magnetic imager – a magnet the size of a room – to check for brain damage. ‘Happily he was all right. But soon after he looked like spaghetti junction, millions of tubes going in and out. Other babies weighed less than a bag of sugar. They looked like stick insects.’ Miraculously most of these 11b babies thrive.

Sister Christina Tom-Johnston, a kindly midwife, counsels bereaved parents. ‘When a mother is about to lose her baby, I’m called to see her at the delivery suite,’ she says. Recently she saw someone whose baby was anencephalic (born with no brain). ‘Due to her religious beliefs, she didn’t want a termination.’

When a baby dies, Christina helps arrange the funeral, accompanies the parents to it, and follows up by telephone. She also runs support groups, and annual remembrance services at Acton Hill Church. ‘We had a congregation of 150 this year, representing 50 dead babies over three years,’ she says. ‘I give the parents daffodils and a candle bearing their baby’s name. The parents come forward when I call out the babies’ names. I’m usually crying myself by this time. Then I light the candle and put it on a table and it burns until the end of the service.’

Fortunately new-born deaths are a rarity. For 99 per cent of the babies born at the hospital – nearly 4,500 babies a year – the outcome is happy. QCHH is a world leader in fetal medicine, boasting Britain’s largest Centre for Fetal Care. Here Professor Nick Fisk’s team has become the first in the world to offer ‘tele-medicine’, which allows the transfer of distant ultrasound scanning images down phone lines to waiting specialists. They received one of the country’s first Siemens scanners allowing detection of any foetal abnormality before the 12th week of pregnancy, often permitting it to be corrected in utero. Here they showed last year for the first time that the unborn child can feel pain in the womb. And here Dr Michael de Swiet, one of only two obstetric physicians in the country, specialises in the medical problems of pregnancy.

It’s also QCCH that pioneered ultrasound; fetal heart monitoring; screening expectant mothers for rubella; Maggie Campbell’s innovative One-to-One midwifery practice – allowing the woman the same midwife throughout her pregnancy and post-natal period for continuity of care – human milk banks, special care baby units, fetal blood sampling, in utero blood transfusions, the mobile epidural; plus the country’s only post-natal depression clinic. This month they’re also starting the country’s first clinic for teenagers, allowing them to discuss gynaecological difficulties in confidence.

Now senior obstetrician John Malvern is running an antenatal clinic, wearing white coat and name label. His current patient, 26-year-old Carol Brown, is on her sixth pregnancy since 1989. ‘A decent sort of gap between pregnancies,’ says John, with an ironic smile. He’ll need his sense of humour. He’s delivering my first born in June.