Abandoned Asylum

(Disclaimer: Joking aside, I fully understand the risks/dangers involved in these adventures and do so in the full knowledge of what could happen. I don't encourage or condone and I accept no responsibility for anyone else following in my footsteps. Under UK law, trespass without force is a civil offence. I never break into a place, I never photograph a place that is currently occupied, as this would be morally wrong and intrusive, I never take any items and I never cause any damage, as such no criminal offences have been committed in the making of this blog. I will not disclose location or means of entry.  I leave the building as I find it and only enter to take photographs for my own pleasure and to document the building.

 

 On the aniversary of my exit from the womb, I decided to go visit Alice, who I've explored with before. I'd actually tried four abandoned locations that day, and failed to get in to any of them. They made for some attractive external shots that I'll probably post on Instagram eventually but nevertheless, I was bitter. Fortunately I wasn't to share this losing streak with my friend, because we could actually get into the next location I had planned. It was, however, a death trap.

This location was once part of a lunatic asylum, and it was referred to as "South House," in spite of being west of the asylums main building. The much larger main building is only a short distance away, and still very much in use, albeit rebranded from lunatic asylum to psychiatric hospital, and no doubt with more modern forms of treatment too. Similarly, this buildings titular opposite, "North House" is also still in use, as is the separate villa formerly used to treat epileptic children, named St Ann's Hospital. For some reason, out of all of the buildings, South House was considered surplus to requirements and left to rot. The staff of the still functioning hospital, from what I've heard, have started to grumble that urban explorers keep trying to get in, mistaking it for this separate, abandoned building.

I despair for humanity when people are faced with this place, and a fully functional psychiatric hospital and can't tell which one is the abandoned one. 

There's not an awful lot left to see. In fact it looks like a warzone. Many experienced urban explorers might consider coming here to be a bit pointless given that there's not much left, but I love the decay, and appreciate the history. And it's not as if one comes across abandoned mental asylums every day, so it made my to-do list.

Te building is roughly fork shaped, made up of three wings. The middle wing seems to be toilet and shower facilities.

I thought at first that this was a urinal, and wondered why it was so big. A short person could lie in this!That's when it hit me- there used to be a bath here.

 While the place has the cleanliness and structural stability of a Facebook political debate, I did come across a story from 1996, detailing how kids used to break in, albeit through much more solid security measures. They described this place as still being furnished, with hospital beds in the rooms and everything. It seems that it's been closed since at least the 1990s, and in a state of steady decline. However, this was likely exacerbated in 2001 when builders started to renovate it, around the time that the titular, but not quite geographically, opposite building North House was converted into a hotel. 

However for some reason work on South House ceased. Some effort was made to keep people out, but now it seems that nobody cares. When Alice and I arrived, we spotted some guys in the upper windows smoking the devils lettuce, and I reassured them that I wasn't security. A couple other guys were poking around the downstairs, and while we were in there, other folks showed up and asked where the means of entry was. The place was well travelled.

In the connecting hallway we found the remains of an elevator, although it's seen better days.

 The lunatic asylum was built in 1848, and completed a year later. It had actually relocated here from another, smaller hospital that had been founded in 1763 and opened in 1766. A letter circulated around the medical profession at the time, bragging that this hospital was "laid out with special reference to the most approved methods of treatment at the expense of £25,000."

Gee, that's less than Serco paid for Microsoft Office. What a bargain!

In regards to the most approved methods of treatment, don't get too excited. The purpose of lunatic asylums wasn't so much to help people, but to brush the undesirables under the rug, so that someones autistic family member didn't embarass them at a get-together. In the early 20th Century, a chap called Henry Cotton concluded that people were mentally ill because certain infected body parts were causing madness. So if someone was depressed, to cheer them up he'd just remove their teeth. When that didn't work, he said that the infection must have gotten into the saliva, and removed their tonsils too. Similarly barbaric, in 1927 a man called Julius Wagner-Jauregg won a nobel prize by deciding that the best way to cure schizophrenia was by injecting patients with malaria. So I dread to think what the most approved methods of treatment were in the 1700s.

Let's also touch on the conditions that warranted incarceration. While it's true that there would have been schizophrenic patients, one could also be sent here for being autistic, or a bit slow, or epileptic, or a non-conformist, or just depressed, or one of those bloody homosexuals. How dare they love someone that some Victorian-era Karen doesn't want them to love. So you probably know someone who is a fully functional member of society who would have been sent to an asylum in the Victorian era. It's a scary thought.

The 1766 hospital had a whopping 24 beds. They tragically underestimated just how low they'd set the bar for asylum admission, and by 1800 they had over a hundred patients. As such they had to relocate, and so this asylum was built. As expected, there was a wing for men, and a wing for women, each then divided over three segments depending on their mental health needs. It was primarily for the upper and middle class, so keeping the rich separate from the poor wasn't necessarily a huge priority like it was in other asylums such as Denbigh. It consisted of 37 acres, but eventually expanded to 220 acres. Much of the outdoor grounds were used for growing food, exercise, and outdoor activities, but newer buildings were also added as the patient numbers increased.

There are stairs on each wing, making the building roughly symmetrical. I'll head up once I've covered the ground floor.

Deviating from the symmetrical layout is this big room, slowly collapsing and decorated with a lone shopping trolley. I think that this may have been an eating area, because it's very close to what is undeniably the kitchen. 

Between here and the kitchen area is the cellar, and that's by far a more exciting prospect than the kitchen, so I swung by there first.

The cellar stairway contains one of the buildings last surviving artifacts, this bin frame on the wall. The lid still works and everything. It just needs a bin bag and it's good to go.

The cellar is gorgeous, but flooded to a depth of roughly waist height on me, and head height on Alice, so we didn't go down any of these tunnels. There are rumours that these tunnels do connect to the main hospital, and given the proximity, and the fact that these are utility tunnels, it does sound plausible. However I think if they ever connected, then the means of connectivity has probably been bricked up. No active hospital is going to have a sprawling sea of stagnant water in the basement. 

But, I will come back and check these tunnels out at some point, once I've got some waders.

Moving on upstairs, I overheard two guys arguing over who should go down into the cellar first, and I felt a moment of pride that my friends are badasses.

 I did wonder, what exactly was South House for? I've seen numerous urbex reports that copy and paste the wikipedia articles because people are lazy, but it's never actually specified. Someone said that there were hospital beds here in the 1990s, so presumably it was a ward. On another report someone claimed that this was the old nurses accomodation. Wikipedia did say that the hospital expanded via the construction of out-buildings in the 1860s, but curiously South House doesn't show up on the maps from the 1890s and early 1900s. North House does, being opened in 1903 with the accomodation capacity of eighty patients. Presumably, given the mirrored naming of the two buildings, South House had a similar purpose. 

However after much searching I finally found a description of the hospital that describes each building, and specifies "150m west of the main hispital stands the nurses home, under consideration before the first world war but not built until 1937."

The proximity to the hospital matches the building, so it seems fairly conclusive. This raises the question of why hospital beds were reported here in the 1990s. Perhaps the person, who was recalling childhood memories, simply mistook the nurses beds for hospital beds. Or perhaps once nurse accomodation stopped, South House became used for storage. 

It's quite interesting that South House was only built in 1937 though. Of all the hospital buildings, it is the newest, and it's also the one that hasn't survived.

So this was the kitchen area, as evidenced by the remnants of wall tiles and the metal chunks of kitchen paraphernalia.

There's a childs seat here, which is odd.

There was clearly also once stairs leading upwards too, but they're now gone.

And here's the best part of any abandoned building, the toilet.

It's still in better condition than the toilets in some pubs and clubs.

The opposite wing of the building is a little bleaker, having hosted a fire at some point in the last few years. It's blackened the walls and damaged the ceiling a bit, but the building still stands. 

Poor South House. Even fire doesn't love it.

Inerestingly, the asylums patients have included some notable famous people. One of the more recent is Margot Bryant, an actress who played someone called Minnie on Coronation Street. I don't watch Coronation Street, because I'm far more focused on living my life than watching other people live theirs, so I can't really put a face to the name.

 Margot Bryant started suffering from memory loss in 1976 and needed to write her lines down on the back of her props, usually her handbag, before finally leaving the show and coming to this hospital, where she was diagnosed with alzheimers. She stayed here until her death in 1988.

I read that Minnie was on the show from episode one, which intrigued me. I can't say I've ever given much thought to what the pilot episode of a TV soap would consist of. They tend to rely on the momentum of the previous episodes drama and cliffhangers, achieving immortality by the slow and subtle introduction of new characters who have their own drama and cliffhangers. But really, I don't know how a single first episode of a soap could get me invested enough in the characters to care about what happens in episode two.

Given that I'm poking around the former living quarters of the nurses who cared for Margot Bryant, and also curious about what Episode One of a soap would entail, I decided to look up the very first episode of Coronation Street. I could see the actress in her pre-hospitalisation days, and hopefully the show itself will help me with my insomnia too.

And spoiler alert, it was boring! Complete and total snoozeville! Nevermind helping me with my insomnia, I want to kill myself! It's just a hornets nest of argumentative and bitchy people doing nothing but commenting on everyone elses life decisions. Did people seriously tune in for Episode Two after this? If this is what normal folks like, I'm staying in the asylum.

Much to my further disapointment, the Minnie character wasn't even in it.

I know, right? The internet had lied to me. Alert the media.

Another famous patient here, going back a bit further, was the cricketer Johnny Briggs. Apparently he was pretty impressive by cricket standards, but I don't know anything about cricket, except that it derives from the most brutal wars in galactic history, and the game is held in poor taste, which is why aliens don't speak to us. But that's another story. 

Johnny Briggs wikipedia page keeps things vague. Around 1900 "it became clear he was suffering severely from mental illness. Confined to an asylum, he never recovered and died early in 1902."

I had to do a little more digging to get more context on that. He was epileptic and suffering from seizures, so they decided to lock him up. Those crazy Victorians.

As you'd expect from a building associated with a mental asylum, there are rumours of paranormal activity. People report screams and strange lights, and allegedly there's the ghost of a former patient called "Old Jack" who will attack anyone who ventures in uninvited. I didn't encounter anything, and if Alice did, she kept it quiet. Needless to say, this being the nurses home does kinda debunk the story of a former patient roaming these halls.

I read an article about a paranormal investigator who stayed the night here, ultimately concluding with "Whether it is really haunted or not, I cant say. You have to watch the video and make up your own mind." 

I'll be honest, I love the paranormal, but my opinion on paranormal youtube channels is low, because youtubers rely on producing regular content, and paranormal stuff just doesn't happen regular enough. If it did, we could study it, and it wouldn't be supernatural anymore.

I watched his video anyway. It can't be worse than the pilot episode of Coronation Street, after all. He was pretty down to Earth, open minded but not trying to make out that every noise or gentle breeze was evidence of life after death. He didn't try to make something out of nothing. His camera malfunctioned at some point, and he just said that it's up to interpretation.

He had a few things to say about the graffiti though, and why not? There's not a bare wall in here.

Check out this horse.

Poor Abby Thomson is hated by everyone.

 Look, even Satan has been here!

It was time to head upstairs. The windows are mostly bricked up down here, which makes it pretty bleak, but in the upper floors we could get more natural light.

The upper rooms are pretty fucked, and mostly inaccessible due to the floor being either weak or collapsed entirely. Here someone has drawn a Ouija board, and someone else has crossed it out. I guess someone doesn't want Old Jack to be conjured up.

I think that symbol on the wall is the transgender symbol, which is pretty cool, and certainly preferable to swastikas and genitalia.

The central hallway has a balcony area,so that people could flash the hospital grounds after a shower.

This woman is wearing a bird cage on her head. I wonder what that's about? 

As with the downstairs central wing, this one also has tiled walls, and is clearly the bathroom area.

Here's the lift shaft.

Here's an archaic Youtube reference.

This large area is directly above the room that I thought might be the eating area downstairs. The floor is a little weak, and there's a door at the end. I guess that used to be a fire exit.

"1, 2, 3, 4, Kill the rich, feed the poor."

I like the graffiti here. There's not much in the way of art, but it's not all pointless tagging either.

These all would have been rooms at some point. One can even see where the former walls were. The graffiti would have been done back when it was possible to walk on these areas.

Here's the stairway that was at the back of the ground floor kitchen.

And soimeone has tried to replicate the painting of the woman in the bathroom area, but left it unfinished. The highlight of this room was a surprising one though. It was this metal pole that's holding up the ceiling. 

Hmm... what does one do with the thing that's stopping us from being crushed to death by a collapsing debris? Pole dance on it, of course! It's a photo opportunity.

Needless to say, Alice is better at this than me, so we'll leave it to her. Thankfully the metal pole was stuck tight, and we didn't bring the place down around us. But also, it is risky behaviour, and please don't do things like this. We're terrible role models.

It was time to check out the top floor.

I love it up here. With the rooftiles long gone, and the windows similarly absent, nature has started to take this building from the top down. In years to come, this could be an entire wild garden.

As you can see, the floor has also degraded in the higher levels, giving us mostly just the hallway to walk along. What used to be the nurses rooms are now gone completely.

Here we're looking down into the room we were just in.

This building is fucked, but I love seeing nature take it back.

We had to climb over this old metal water tank to proceed any further.

Here's the lift shaft.

The central hall is as it was downstairs, obviously a bathroom area. However this time it's got nature.

"I've fucked my life up so much everyone hates me."

Abbi Thomson, is that you? It's a little concerning. I hope this person is okay. I don't hate you.

It's weird to look at these bathrooms and think that they were once sanitary, and used by people.

"Kaylum is a woman abuser, the prick."

The decay here is absolutely beautiful.

This was probably a toilet.

We concluded at this end room, which is quite spacious and has a fireplace.

I liked this room. I think if I was going to pick a room to camp out in on a summers night, this would be it. I probably wouldn't do that though. This place probably gets swarmed with pigeons.

We have a pretty nice view of the rest of the building. But also, because we're so close to an airport, planes flew over us regularly, and since this room had not much in the way of a ceiling, we were able to photograph the planes as they came in for landing.

This is pretty cool. If you look closely you'll see that the landing gear is down, ready to drop folks off at the airport. I remember when I went to Berlin, and Teufelsberg was visible from the plane, and I could see people down there walking around. I couldn't waitr to land and check it out for myself. This place isn't the same as Teufelsberg. It's nowhere near as gigantic or achitecturally impressive, but I like to think someone is in there, looking down at two weirdos with cameras poking around an abandoned building.

Planes are so cool to look at this close up though. To look at them, one can't help but wonder how the hell it stays in the air at all. But it does. Science is awesome. 

Anyway, that's all I've got. To conclude, the fact that this is just the nurses accomodation of the asylum might snatch the magic away for some, and many urban explorers might look at this and say "What's the point?" If you're like me, and happy with anything, then it's a nice little stop. If you're a beginner to urbex then this place is perfect. It's not safe, but they never are. But it's easy to get into, and there's plenty of people around. Go with a friend. Bring your girlfriend. Bring your boyfriend. Don't bring them both at the same time unless they know about each other and are cool with it.

Anyway, next blog post is a ROC bunker, and then it's something else underground that is bloody massive. In the meantime, follow my Instagram, follow my Facebook, follow my Twitter and Follow me over on Reddit. 

Thanks for reading!