A 50th ANNIVERSARY tribute to the man who ran the 'miracle mile' opens next month at St Mary's hospital in the form of a £250,000 lecture theatre for students.

IDEA League sports event captains with Sir Roger, centre in June last year

The Sir Roger Bannister Lecture Theatre will be officially opened on 10 March. Designed to seat 70, it will be fully equipped with modern audio visual equipment and flip-up cinema style seating, 10 per cent of which will be set up for left handed people.

The building forms part of a £30 million refurbishment of the former medical school building, much of which has been spent on research space.

Money for this first new lecture theatre was donated by the St Mary's Development Trust, chaired by Sir Roger.

A second theatre with about 150 seats is scheduled for completion this summer.

A large mural depicting Sir Roger completing his historic run will hang in the theatre, together with an enlarged photograph of him being carried on the shoulders of other St Mary's students on the morning after the run. A newly commissioned portrait of Sir Roger painted by Humphrey Bangham will also be exhibited.

Sir Roger did pre-clinical studies - psychology and research - at Oxford before moving to St Mary's hospital medical school on an Open and State Scholarship in 1951. He ran the world's first sub four minute mile - 3min 59.4 secs on 6 May 1954, and explained the art of record breaking at the time as: 'the ability to take more out of yourself than you've got.'

"This is the first academic institution to name a building after me and I'm delighted," he said. "It's a great honour to be recorded for future students to wonder a little about who I was and what I did.

"I always intended to be a serious doctor and ran whilst I was a medical student. On the day, I started the morning at the medical school and remember sharpening my spikes on the grindstone in the physiology lab to make sure they went into the ground smoothly."

He spent 'three happy years' as a student at St Mary's, involving himself in many activities, as well as running in many London cross country races, including events across Hyde Park, which were frequently won by St Mary's.

"I also did a bit of acting, such as one act plays, as well as Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan. I played clever dandies. A musical version of St Mary's dramatic society would put on Gilbert and Sullivan productions, and pantomimes, depending largely on the energy of the producer, Michael Lawrence, who I still see. He's an orthopaedic surgeon at Guys hospital. Like me, he has an interest in sports medicine."

Sir Roger was a consultant neurologist at St Mary's Hospital and the Western Ophthalmic Hospital from 1963 to 1985 and subsequently consulting neurologist. He also chaired St Mary's Hospital Medical Committee from 1983 to 1985 and has been a trustee of the St Mary's Development Trust since 1994 and its Chairman since 1998.

• A book St Mary's: A History of a London Teaching Hospital has been published. Researched and written by Dr Elsbeth Heaman when she was a research fellow of the Imperial College Centre for the History of Science Technology and Medicine, it contains a foreword by Sir Roger and is the first complete history of St Mary's.