A 36-hour ‘push’ to raise £1 million for Noah’s Ark children’s hospice is being drawn up to cover its running costs over the next 12 months.

Schools and businesses in north London are staging fundraising events for the next six weeks to raise money to help make a difference to the lives of seriously-ill children. 

Everything raised up to October 20 is being doubled — thanks to the charity’s partners in the business world. They then have a final 36-hour push to get to £1m.

The charity is also marking the fifth anniversary of the grand opening of Noah’s Ark by London Mayor Sadiq Khan in 2019.

But it had humble beginnings in a small office at London Colney, near Radlett, set up by Michael McInerney in 2006 following the death in hospital of a child in his family. He was unhappy with options available for the child and started Noah’s Ark children’s charity in 2006.

Then the idea of actually building ‘The Ark’ emerged, to support families in the north London boroughs of Barnet, Camden, Enfield, Haringey and Islington as well as Hertsmere where it started.

Building The Ark was going to take time and money. But the ambitious £10million project attracted support from the construction industry and work at cost price started in 2017, after a four-year fundraising campaign by deputy chief executive Alison Goodman.

“I’m humbled by everyone who helped us build this extraordinary place,” she recalls.

“We have made it possible over the past five years for the children and their families to make the most of every day.”

The hospice run by paediatric palliative specialists is set in a seven-and-a-half acre nature reserve, a “haven of calm and safety”. 

A sensory trail, accessible by wheelchair, extends for a mile, passing through a meadow, bluebell wood and along wildlife ponds. 

The Ark itself has holistic soft-play hydrotherapy rooms, children’s bedrooms and a playground with a wheelchair seesaw, trampoline and a swing. 

A green biosolar roof with solar panels and native wildflower vegetation brings renewable energy and life to The Ark — giving compassionate 24-hour end-of-life care.  

Barnet has a history of innovation in palliative care.

Dame Cicely Saunders, who founded the modern hospice movement, was born in Chipping Barnet. She trained as a doctor at St Thomas’s in Lambeth in the 1940s and later worked for seven years at St Joseph’s hospice in South Hackney.

Dame Cicely always insisted that people needed dignity, compassion and respect right to the end. She died in 2005 aged 87 at St Christopher’s Hospice in Sydenham, which she founded herself.