Just Come in: 30 Years of Maggie's Centres

Just Come in: 30 Years of Maggie's Centres is open at RIBA North in Gallery 2, 21 Mann Island, from Saturday 12 September to Sunday 29 November. It's a photographic commission by Tabitha Jussa, who has documented six Maggie's centres — Edinburgh, Dundee, Oldham, Wirral, Cardiff and Southampton — and the show is curated by Kate Dooley. Alongside the photographs, there's a bespoke booklet by Atelier Walldballig, handbound in the Japanese tradition by Stanley James Press.

For context, Maggie's is a charity founded in 1995 by Maggie Keswick Jencks, which works with leading architects to design support spaces for people living with cancer. Each centre is shaped around light, warmth, domesticity and a close connection to nature, and there are now more than 30 across the UK and internationally. The first opened a year after her death, following a 1993 diagnosis that her cancer had returned, which sent her and her husband into relentless research and planning to improve the experience for others. In a cancer-patient-care journal she wrote, 'Above all what matters is not to lose the joy of living in the fear of dying' — a founding principle the centres have held ever since.

The exhibition marks 30 years of Maggie's and 60 years of the RIBA Awards. There's also a local connection: a new Liverpool centre is planned for the site of the old Royal Liverpool University Hospital, expected in 2027.

Entry is free, and the gallery is open Monday to Sunday, including bank holidays, from 10am to 5:50pm. You'll find it in Gallery 2 at RIBA North, 21 Mann Island.