Inside an Asylum
I was asked to write an article for the Section 61 magazine about what you can find inside an asylum. This is what I came up with!
Hospitals today contain wards for the sick where they can stay until they are deemed healthy enough to be discharged. But what if there was no treatment? No Cure? Lunatic asylums were built with the long stay patient in mind and had to be a lot different architecturally to cater for there needs.
In 1890 there were 120,344 patients in Lunatic Asylums, after a steady rise throughout the first half of the century, the resident population of psychiatric hospital beds reached a peak of 152,000 in 1954. Today with closure and changes in health care the resident inpatient population detained under the mental health act is 14,700 patients.
Nurses Home
Working up to 80- hours a week and often for poor pay, asylums offered staff accommodation, this being beneficial for both the hospital and the nurse. Long hours and odd shifts meant that living onsite was easier for the nurses and with pay for them being low it was often the only housing that would be available to them. Living on site also created a sense of family and friendship between the staff. Superintendents could reasonably call upon a nurse with very short notice should a crisis ensue within the hospital. Nurse’s blocks are very reminiscent of Uni halls small individual rooms in a non descript block, often with a communal area for recreation.
Main Hall
The “heart” of any asylum, often structurally ornate, these were for the recreation of both the patients and the staff. A stage built at one end for productions and plays for both patients and outside events and later saw use as a good place to place a projection screen. Often in a quite tacked on, hurriedly built way on the outside of the opposite will be a projectionists booth always noticeable by the square cut holes in the wall.
Patient dances were often held especially on special occasions like Christmas often allowing rare interaction between male and female patients who were housed in different wing … supervised of course!
Some were used as dining halls and this is why most asylum kitchens can often be found nearby.
Cane Hill held its 70th birthday celebration for the staff in the now burnt out hall.
Work Therapy/ Industrial Therapy/Occupational Therapy/Art Therapy
Exactly what it says on the tin! A place where long stay patients could learn new skills and occupations and often make things to sell on Hospital Open Days and to the local community.
A lot of therapy buildings are either made out of other rooms in the hospital that have been modified or in separate areas even prefabs that were built as times changed within the treatment of mental health. West Park ’s art therapy room was made from an old ward.
The best example of a therapy room can be seen at Cane Hill which still has a lot of artwork in it. Some of the artwork is very basic and some shows a real out pouring of the patients feelings. It is sad that it has ended up neglected and forgotten.
Opticians / Dentist
If a patient can’t go to the opticians/dentist then the dentist and optician will have to come to them. Often located near to each other within the asylum complex and in the case of West Park in the same room! These buildings were usually close to admin probably as it was easier to keep them secure and looked after… and not too far for the doctors to travel from Admin.
Unusually most of the dentists that I have been into contain quite a lot still in them, West Park even had patients dentures that were never to be collected. Deva asylum still has a rather menacing looking dentists chair in the annexe building
X-ray / Theatres
X ray rooms are always a good find in a hospital as there are a lot of immovable parts which are left behind; one of my best finds so far was in Leybourne Grange which had a very intact old X-ray department but the best for X-rays themselves had to be Whittingham, they were by the old store building, hundreds of x-rays scattered about showing all kinds of body parts and broken bones I will always remember one just named ‘Elizabeth’ propped up at a window showing a shattered collar bone.
I have seen quite a few theatres in my travels but no real major ones in asylums as the rooms that they were in I believe were changed and if the need for a major operation arose they would be taken to the nearest general hospital.
Although there was one room that was almost totally unique to asylums; these were the ECT suites. I have only ever found one and that was in Deva, which was a very not descript door almost under a stairwell only identified by a small marker pen arrow which pointed to a bell with ECT above it! Inside there were signs on the doors for a treatment room and 2 recovery areas everything was stripped within apart from the cupboards but it must have been quite a busy place for 2 recovery rooms.
Looking at some notes I have; even in 2005 there were 12,800 ECT procedures preformed on 2300 patients within the UK . Approximately 340 of which were detained under the mental health act and did not consent to treatment.
Mortuary
Ok….. So every hospital has one of these but to explorers it really is the place that people normally never get to see. Everyone knows …. It’s where you go after you’ve “gone”!
Mortuaries are usually stand alone small brick built two door structures with a skylight (for extra light above the mortuary table) often built near to machinery or maintenance buildings, slightly out of the way as not to worry people and patients but where a car or van will not be noticed to much.
Cane Hill is most probably the, most famous of any mortuary building in the UK, unusual in its self as due to the size of the institution it has two mortuary tables and a lot of things still in situ, such as the attendants boots and overcoats as well as the laying out trolley for taking the bodies into the mortuary chapel next door. Hellingly mortuary has sadly been burnt out but there are still a few bits to see, the enclosed body trolleys still remain. Deva is the only asylum I have been into that has a stainless steel mortuary table as most are ceramic. A lot of mortuaries no longer contain the slabs in them they have either been removed or in some cases like Leybourne Grange and Denbigh have been smashed and broken.
Laundry
As common as the kitchen, the laundry was where ALL the linen and clothes of the patients and staff would go. Female patients would be employed within the laundry to help out with the daily process of washing, drying, ironing, darning sorting and folding. Some hospitals even made successful small businesses out of the laundry charging outside company’s and even other hospitals.
Whtecroft laundry has to be the best one that I have been into, after the closure of the hospital it was still used as a commercial laundry so a lot of things look like they could be started up again! The personal touches that were left by the workers are everywhere including stickers and pictures on the dryers, it is also probably the only place where I have seen the huge weighing scales unsmashed and still working.
Leybourne Grange is another hospital with a HUGE laundry which is attached to the kitchens and maintenance buildings to form a square with a small courtyard in the centre. Although stripped some of the larger scale machines remain including the old Weston steam machines that have a manikins in them so that staff uniforms could be pressed easily. The only other place that I have seen one of these was in the Laundry building in Cane Hill, which although very distressed after 15 years of abandonment still retains a lot of original features.
Farm
Sounds strange to us today but Asylums tried to be as self sufficient as possible, at the time of construction they were often built in remote landscapes as this was thought to aid recovery, so bringing food in proved to be quite expensive. Farms were the ultimate answer, the hospital grows its own food and the patients gain new experiences and skills working on the farm. Working out doors on the farm was a desired position for the patients.
Farms were usually located a distance away from the hospital itself, as they required a lot of land for livestock and crops and as such when the priorities changed as regard to patients working and the need for self sufficiency of the asylums became less due to better and cheaper food transportation, the farm buildings became less of a use and were sold off to feed the post war housing boom, Denbigh I believe was sold in this way.
Fairmile still has a farm on site and although on C H Howells original plans it is sadly not listed so will no doubt be demolished in the next few years. The farm is close to the maintenance areas and although showing signs of serious neglect it is still possible to see the area in which animals were kept.
Padded Cell
The padded cell is probably the symbol that most people think of when the word Lunatic Asylum is mentioned! Not many are still in existence today there are the remains of one in Hellingly which has been burnt and torn out all but the floor, one in West Park which is now almost inaccessible and one from Whitecroft which is now being restored (in my outhouse)! Amazingly when I thought of a padded cell before seeing one I always thought that they were soft; like bouncing on a tough pillow but they were commonly made from a heavy canvas on a rigid structure stuffed with horsehair like material and then painted with a kind of rubberised paint.
Kitchens
Everyone had to eat, so there really had to be a kitchen section too! Kitchens made all the food for the patients and staff and had to be easily the busiest part of the hospital. In the days of the hospital farm a lot of the vegetables etc would have been from onsite. Food was served to patients in a canteen of there was one or if not sometimes the main hall was used and in places like High Royds the food was taken on trolleys to the wards, the rows of plugs to keep the food trolleys warm can still be seen in the corridor outside the hall.
I have a funny story about Hellingly Kitchens from the 1980’s from my former boss who was a salesman for an industrial kitchens supplier.
“I was showing a new employee my route and let’s just say he wasn’t the brightest! Before we went into the kitchen at Hellingly I told the new boy not to stare at anyone and let me do all the talking. So we walk into the kitchens and see staff and patients working away at preparing lunch. We are just about to talk to the Head Chef about what he needed that month and ‘Mr Intelligent’ exclaims loudly “My god you actually let the nutters loose with knives in here …. I think you’re the mad one mate!!” As you can imagine we left the kitchens quickly and went into the office for a short chat, where the less than happy Head Chef gave the new boy a dressing down. He didn’t order much funnily enough and on the way out we had to walk past the entrance to the kitchens; as we walked past the doorway we heard a thud and peering round there was a knife embedded in the wall right by where we were walking …… and a shout of “yep they do …. But my aims a little off today!!” It went without saying that he didn’t stay with the company for very long”