With my particular interest in asylums, I also visited The Retreat in York, and although Colin and I were not ‘doing’ Buckinghamshire, I grew up in Chalfont St Peter and so know the National Epileptic Centre there quite well. The York team covered the north, the Cambridge team the centre and south-west, while Colin Thom and I covered the south-east quarter from London, although towards the end of the project we also visited sites in the West Midlands, Staffordshire, and Avon. (I confess, I have changed the odd ‘very dull’ for plain or utilitarian.) As I review these sites, I may well find that those opinions also need reviewing.įieldwork for the survey was carried out by the teams on a geographical division of the country.
Opinions expressed are my own, and were sometimes formed at the end of a very long day. I did consider exchanging these terms for more socially acceptable wording, but took the decision to keep to the original as historically accurate. The terminology used is contemporary with the date of construction, so there are institutions for lunatics, idiots, imbeciles and mental defectives. The results of the research were published in 1998 as English Hospitals 1660-1948, a survey of their architecture and design. In addition is an NBR number – this is the file number, and should allow anyone to find the file at the archives of Historic England in Swindon. I took the asylums, and, in order to make sense of this deluge of information, I made brief notes on each site, with the approximate date of foundation, design and construction, later additions and alterations, what sort of information was in the file in terms of plans and/or photographs, and usually a snap judgment about its architectural interest. In 1993, after fieldwork had stopped, the six investigators who carried out the survey from three RCHME offices, at York, Cambridge and London, met up to exchange files so that we could each concentrate on a different hospital type. The list was originally compiled from the files on these sites put together in the course of the RCHME’s survey of historic hospital conducted between 19.
It lists hospitals and/or asylums that cared for the mentally ill, concentrating on those that were purpose built, from Robert Hooke’s Bethlem Hospital of 1675 up to local authority institutions built in the 1940s – prior to the establishment of the National Health Service.
This particular list differs in that it is arranged chronologically it also acts as an index to the hospital files at Historic England’s Archives. There are many lists on the web of psychiatric hospitals, former mental hospitals or lunatic asylums. A Gazetteer of Historic Asylums and Mental Hospitals in England, 1660-1948
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