Barts North Wing, home to the meticulously restored Hogarth Stair and Great Hall, is a free City landmark currently up for a Toast the City Award.

Public voting in the Toast the City Awards has closed, but the judges have yet to cast their votes for their favourite bars, restaurants, hotels, coffee shops, cultural venues and more. As head judge, I have spent the past couple of weeks trekking back and forth across the Square Mile to reacquaint myself with everything it has to offer.

I am a little ashamed to admit that, after working here for almost 17 years, I had never visited Barts North Wing, which recently reopened following a year of renovations. What better time, then, to finally see this City icon, which is nominated in both the Best Art or Culture Experience and Best New Opening categories?

It is not the kind of place you would stumble upon by accident. It sits down the road from St Bartholomew the Great, London's oldest parish church and home to an incredible Damien Hirst statue of the eponymous saint — flayed to death and holding his own skin. The entrance to the St Barts hospital courtyard lies beside the William Wallace Memorial. Before reaching the courtyard, you pass another church, the wonderfully named St Bartholomew the Less, from which, on my visit, the sound of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor drifted from the organ.

Barts North Wing restoration

Take a left in the courtyard and you arrive at a green door that manages to be at once grand and unassuming. It leads to the North Wing, built in 1732 and home to the Hogarth Stair and the Great Hall. This part of St Barts Hospital — an institution founded in the 12th century — was designed to impress wealthy patrons, whom the hospital hoped to persuade to donate in the era before the NHS, when hospitals depended on charitable giving rather than state funding. Architect James Gibbs — influenced by both the Italian Renaissance architect Palladio and Sir Christopher Wren, and whose other London works include St Martin-in-the-Fields on Trafalgar Square — created a stunning carved staircase rising to the Great Hall.

It is the mural, however, that truly commands attention. William Hogarth's vast painting of the Good Samaritan used the likenesses of real-life patients from the hospital — complete with their medical conditions — transplanted into the biblical scene. Hogarth, better known today as the satirist behind series such as A Rake's Progress, painted the stair murals free of charge, in a stated effort to show that British artists could match the decorative painters of continental Europe. The result is an astonishing space, incongruous with the working hospital to which it is attached, and the painstaking restoration means it looks as vibrant as the day the paint first dried. And it is free to visit. Whether it wins one of our awards remains to be seen, but if you have a free lunch break in the Square Mile, it is well worth checking out.

• Visit the Barts North Wing website for opening times.