The holy grail of urban architecture is the Tardis effect, a building small on the outside revealing a huge interior. So it is with intrigue that I wandered into a bright orange building off the dingy Fulham Palace Road in west London, the latest work from Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners, whose office is by the Thames only a couple of streets away. From the outside it looks like a big structure, deep overhanging eaves overshooting massive walls. On the inside it looks small, intimate and cosy, a kind of reverse Tardis.

The architects of Heathrow’s Terminal 5 and the Pompidou Centre have achieved something very unusual, a robust, highly visible structure sheltering a familiar, embracing, domestic-scaled space. This is London’s first Maggie’s Centre, the latest in a striking production line of unique and architecturally enthralling centres dedicated to people affected by cancer. Conceived as a programme by the architecture critic Charles Jencks and his wife Maggie Keswick Jencks, who died from cancer in 1995, it has led to a series of wonderfully uplifting little buildings across Britain by some of the most recognisable names in world architecture, from Zaha Hadid to Frank Gehry. The aim of the centres is to provide patients with an informal, non-institutional drop-in facility where they can access information, company, solace, advice or just retreat. These may be housed in sculptural buildings by renowned architects but at the heart of each is nothing more starry than a kitchen table and a kettle.