Forty-five years in Holborn: where Sardinia House began

Two dentists and a practice in Holborn

Forty-five years ago, Dr Julian Ede and Dr John Leach opened a private dental practice in Holborn. It was a small, considered sort of place from the beginning: two dentists who wanted to do careful work for people they would see again and again. That intention has been handed down through the practice ever since, and it is still the simplest way to describe what we do here.

The practice has always been private. There is no NHS treatment and there never has been. What that bought, then as now, was time: time to assess properly, to plan, and to fit the work to the person in the chair. Across the team today there is more than a hundred years of combined clinical experience, and a good deal of it was gathered within these walls.

The move to Lincoln's Inn Fields

Around fifteen years ago the practice moved to the fourth floor of Sardinia House, on the south-west corner of Lincoln's Inn Fields. The entrance is on Sardinia Street, opposite the LSE's Cheng Kin Ku Building, between Holborn and Aldwych. If you have walked past, you will know the building by the Roman capitals lettered across its front.

The square itself suits us. It is one of the quieter corners of central London, around five minutes from Holborn station and around ten from Covent Garden, close enough for someone to step out of an office or a lecture and be with us inside a quarter of an hour. Plenty of patients have been doing exactly that for years.

Twenty years looking after the LSE

We have cared for LSE staff and students for more than twenty years, which is longer than we have been in this building. The school is across the street, so it is a natural fit, and it has become one of the practice's longest relationships. Many of the people we see first arrived as students and have simply stayed.

That relationship is practical as well as sentimental. Anyone with LSE ID receives a discount of up to 30 to 40 per cent on most routine treatments. We like the idea that a check-up or a hygienist visit can fit between a seminar and the library without much fuss, and we have shaped the diary to make that easy.

The practice the others grew from

Sardinia House is the original practice of Atelier Dental Group. Widegate House in Spitalfields and Bellevue Dental in Wandsworth both grew from it, and the way those practices work, the planning, the peer review, the written treatment plan, was worked out here first. When clinicians from the group talk about how things are done, this is usually the place they mean.

Being the oldest voice in a family carries a certain responsibility. The group's clinicians plan complex cases together and hold regular peer-review sessions, and some of us also teach other dentists on live cases through Building Better, the education academy Dr Spencer Richman and I co-founded. Teaching keeps you honest about your own work, which is no bad thing for a heritage practice.

What has changed

The dentistry itself has changed more in the last fifteen years than in the decades before. Every surgery now has an iTero™ or Primescan intra-oral scanner, so every appointment starts with a scan you can see on screen. There is a Dentsply Sirona CBCT for 3D imaging, Zeiss and CJ-Optik operating microscopes, and digital X-rays throughout.

Most visibly, we make things here. CEREC milling on site means a crown can be designed, made and fitted in a single visit. SprintRay 3D printers produce surgical and endodontic guides, models and retainers on site. The founders planned with their eyes and their hands; we plan on screen first, and the hands follow a design we have already checked.

What has not

The things we have kept are quieter. Our front-of-house team has been with us a long time and knows patients by name, not by file number. You will usually be greeted by someone who remembers your last visit and asks about the thing you mentioned. That was true forty-five years ago and we have made a point of not losing it.

And every patient is still handed a written plan, fees included, after their examination and before any work begins. Clinicians still look at one another's work. And we still take the view that a good practice is one where people are known and looked after between visits, not only during them. The tools are new. The reason for using them is not.