The NHS Nightingale Hospital has been placed on "standby" after treating just a few dozen patients since it was opened.
The 4,000-bed emergency field hospital opened at the ExCel Centre in east London earlier this month after being built in the space of just a few weeks.
But today Boris Johnson’s official spokesman confirmed reports that NHS Nightingale in London would be mothballed.
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He added it has been “effectively placed on standby so it would be ready to receive patients should that be required. We are not anticipating that will be the case.”
Four Nightingale hospitals outside London have been built across the UK, including Birmingham, Manchester, Bristol and Harrogate.
It is understood that none of these hospitals have taken any patients.
The spokesman added that the Nightingales were “absolutely not” a waste of money.
He added: “That’s obviously a very positive thing and we’re grateful to everybody in London for following the government’s advice to protect the NHS.”
Earlier this month, NHS England’s national medical director Professor Stephen Powis defended the construction of the hospitals because they added much-need hospital bed capacity
Asked if NHS Nightingale hospitals were built in error, Prof Powis said: "Absolutely 100% not."
"If you wind the clock back a month or two, we were looking at an increase in the number of cases, infections, in the UK.
"We were watching images from around the world of health systems that were overwhelmed and we had not put in place, were about to put in place, a series of social distancing measures not absolutely knowing how the public would respond to that.
"It would have been foolish to have not planned for extra capacity within the NHS. We did that in a number of ways including the Nightingales."
Prof Powis continued: "The fact that we have not needed to use all that capacity is actually good news because it means that the public have complied with the social distancing measures.
"They've started to flatten that curve and we've seen fewer admissions and ultimately fewer deaths than we might have seen if this virus had just been left to spread unchecked.
"And the very early worst case scenarios that no country has let play out would have meant many, many, many deaths and an awful lot of pressure on health services.
"So I think you would have been a hundred, a thousand times more critical if the NHS had not put in that extra capacity and had become overwhelmed.
"You would be quite rightly asking us why we had not gone every mile that we could possibly go to, to put in that extra capacity."
He concluded: "So the Nightingales were not built in error and we may still need them.
"We are not through this yet and although government policy and the scientific advice is to try and ensure that the virus does not start to spread widely again, we can never absolutely be certain.
"And therefore for the months ahead, we need to maintain that extra capacity until we have more certainty."
He continued: "I think you would be a hundred, a thousand times more critical if the NHS had not put in that extra capacity and had become overwhelmed."
