Opened in 2008 to be used exclusively for post-mortem exams of suspicious deaths – the first of its kind in London to be used specifically for this purpose. It was set up to be able to deal with mass casualties, with space to store up to 102 bodies. There is also a bio-hazard post-mortem room and a CCTV viewing area, with a live link to the post-mortem for investigators to watch the pathologists at work.

The facility was named after Dr Iain West (1944 – 2001), a British forensic pathologist who was head of the Department of Forensic Medicine at Guy’s Hospital between 1984 and 1998. West was involved in examining numerous deaths; perhaps most famously Robert Maxwell, Jill Dando and Yvonne Fletcher, the British police officer who was shot from the Libyan embassy in 1984. He was also involved in the release of British soldier Lee Clegg, who had been convicted of murder.

The most high profile international case with which Iain West was involved was the investigation into the death of Kenya’s Foreign Minister Dr Robert Ouko in February 1990. In 1996 Dr Iain West published Dr Iain West’s Casebook along with journalist Chester Stern, in which he gives a comprehensive record of some of the most famous cases in his career.