St Bartholomew’s Hospital Charitable Fund is a new charity formed in 2025 to bring about a merger of two existing charities, The Voluntary Hospital of St Bartholomew and The Rahere Association. Like our predecessors, the new Fund’s focus is solely on helping patients and staff at St Bartholomew’s Hospital at West Smithfield. Today the Fund has an endowment of approximately £12m.
Although we are new, dedicated to serving the Hospital’s 21st century needs, our roots go back a long way. The Hospital itself was founded in 1123 by Rahere, a favourite courtier of Henry I, whose tomb can be seen at the nearby priory church of St Bartholomew the Great. On a pilgrimage to Rome, Rahere fell ill and had a vision of St Bartholomew who directed him to found a church and hospital. On his return, he did just that at Smithfield in the “suburbs” of the City of London, just outside its city wall. The Hospital continued under the care of the monks of St Bartholomew’s Priory until Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries threatened its future. The City of London, concerned about the loss of this refuge for the sick and poor, petitioned the king and in 1546, on his death bed, he gave the Hospital to the City of London as “a place and house of the relief and sustenation of poor people”. The City appointed governors to run the Hospital and those governors constituted the first of our founding charities, The Voluntary Hospital of St Bartholomew.
The Voluntary Hospital continued until 1948 and the creation of the National Health Service when we ceased to have responsibility for running the Hospital and it transferred to the NHS. Certain charitable funds remained and the Voluntary Hospital transformed into a registered charity to manage and apply those funds. In 2025, with Charity Commission consent, we completed a major reorganisation of those funds to ensure they could be used more effectively to support the modern needs of the Hospital.
The Rahere Association was formed as a charity in 1953, following the establishment of the NHS, adopting the name of Rahere to remember and draw inspiration from his great act of philanthropy in founding the Hospital 830 years before. The new charity raised funds from City institutions to assist the Hospital and built up an endowment that allowed it to make numerous grants to patients to help with vital needs that can make all the difference, such as travel costs for regular out-patient treatment, wigs and bras for cancer patients, and stair lifts, mobility aids and home adaptations to allow patients to leave hospital and live as full a life as possible.
In recent years the two charities have often worked together and in early 2026 we combined under the new name St Bartholomew’s Hospital Charitable Fund. Our history and traditions remain important to us but our united strength can now be used to help meet today’s challenges for all who are cared for, work and study at Barts. We continue with our major emphasis on small grants that make a big difference but are now also able to fund some larger projects to support specific needs where other funding falls short. You can read about some of those projects elsewhere on this website.