No ordinary asylum

Colney Hatch was, even more than the proposals by Bevans and Tuke, every­thing the York Retreat was not. It represented an extreme of the new Victorian large-scale asylums, a new building type without precedent. It was built by public funds following the County Asylum Acts of 1808 and then 1845 which first allowed and then compelled counties to build asylums for pauper lunatics. They were intended to replace the so-called ‘trade in lunacy’, whereby private, unlicenced establishments or the workhouse took in the mad poor.13

Colney Hatch was no ordinary asylum. The foundation stone was laid by Prince Albert in 1849 amidst ‘an august assemblage of noblemen and gentlemen’.14 It was opened in the year of the Great Exhibition, 1851, and visitors to London were invited to tour with the guidebook specially published for the occasion to see the state of British care of its less fortunate citizens.15 It was the largest asylum in the world. It was reputed to be the longest building in the world – a third of a mile long – outstretching the Crystal Palace itself.16 Larger than Versailles,17 its frontage was three times that of Buckingham Palace.18 Built of London stock brick with stone dressings in a loosely Italianate design, the huge building was dominated by a central block with two towers and an octagonal dome. Designed on the ‘corridor plan’, the asylum had an administration block in the centre, with long wings on an incline on either side. Placing all functions under a single roof was a cost-saving measure. For asylum purposes it meant surveillance of very extensive wings
from the administrative core in the middle. The hospital site sloped from north to south, which afforded both good drainage and also enabled all galleries, day-rooms and airing courts for exercise to be placed south, south-east and south-west with extensive views and privacy.19

The asylum, like others, was conceived as a self-supporting community, replete with farming, gardening, dairy, brewery, and gas-works, the labour contributed by patients as cost-effective and a form of occupational therapy.20 Tasks included maintenance activities, and sewing their own shrouds.21 Conveniently, the Great Northern Railway was under construction at the time as it carried both goods and patients to the asylum. Looking back, it is very difficult today to recreate the mood of enthusiasm and excitement which accompanied the opening of this institution. Whereas at the laying of the foundation stone the Chairman of the Middlesex County magistrates had declared that ‘the internal walls will not, we hope, be permitted to remain so dead and prison-like as those we find at present in our public asylums. . . . We would feign (sic) hope that those gloomy days have passed away. . .’,22 the interior walls were, in fact, unplastered whitewash. Visitors soon contrasted its imposing Italianate exterior to its stark interior. The floors were either uncovered brick and flagstone or asphalt, and became so odiferous – as

patients avoided the nightly walk on the cold wet floors to relieve themselves – that wood flooring was introduced.23 Ceilings were an arched configuration of fire-proofed tiles and concrete. The iron-framed casement windows let in little light and air, and were operable only by attendants – and then opened only an inch or two.24 The wards in the centre were dark, poorly heated and sparsely furnished. In the early years lavatories were unpainted and opened onto the galleries.25 With six miles of corridor and wards, one can only imagine the perpetual noise and labour required to push trolleys up and down the corridors all day.

In architectural terms the building has never been highly regarded. Chosen in competition in 1847, the design by S. W. Daukes for the County of Middlesex, appeared to have been concerned above all with keeping costs low. In summing up the results, the leading architectural journal of the day concluded that: ‘Externally, little has been aimed at’.26 The author of the large survey, Hospitals and Asylums of the World, published in the late nineteenth century, made the point that there was nothing noteworthy in the building except its size and nothing worthy of emulation.27

Like other county asylums of the period, Colney Hatch officially eschewed mechanical restraints though it maintained padded cells.28 However, instances of harsh treatment – locking up dirty or destructive patients for weeks, forcing them to sleep on the floor, using restraints including belts, straps and locked gloves, wrapping patients in wet sheets, were recorded under the regime of Dr Edgar Sheppard who served as Medical Superintendent from 1862-81.29 Those who could afford it were not taken care of in county asylums, but rather at home or in a very different sort of insti­tution, private facilities for the middle classes or well-to-do. This, however, was a custodial institution for pauper lunatics in which parsimony ruled. It was primarily for chronic, long-term patients: people with nowhere else to go. Due to its overcrowding despite its enormous size, additional accommodation was required and a series of wooden structures were added in 1896. One of the worst disasters in British institutional history took place in 1903 when 51 people, patients and staff, died in a fire.30 Additional free-standing buildings were added to provide housing for fire survivors and others.31

Colney Hatch was the most infamous asylum in the nineteenth century. Its historians, two twentieth-century doctors, Drs Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter, the latter a consultant psychiatrist at Friern Hospital, have written extensively on the history of psychiatry,32 and have asserted in the opening to their study of Colney Hatch that:

to the public it conjured up high walls, long grey buildings and mys­terious suffering. Colney Hatch symbolized madness in Victorian literature as New Bedlam did in Augustan. .. . Unlike contemporary charitable foundations devoted to particular diseases and organs, it gained neither social standing nor scientific renown. Here society’s impossibles, victims of the double misfortune of lunacy and pauper­ism, found asylum whatever the disease that made them so.33

Its notoriety stemmed not only from its immense size but from the fact that though designed for 1,200 patients, its population grew to nearly 3,000 with only two doctors on staff. There was nothing one would liken today to medical treatment. In 1889 the asylum came under the administration of the London County Council, and at that time there was one Medical Superintendent with a staff of five doctors.34 During the First World War the patient population exceeded 3,000.

Renamed Friern Mental Hospital in the 1930s, to rid it of its negative associations, it retained its original functions though wards and corridors were reduced in size. In 1948 Friern, like other former county hospitals, came under the aegis of the National Health Service. In 1959, following the Mental Health Act, it became simply Friern Hospital as mental hospitals were put on an equal footing with other kinds of hospitals.35 In 1983, in an era of a cash-starved health service under Margaret Thatcher, the decision to close this and other mental hospitals was made,36 realizing a capital infusion from the sales. A stretched Health Service had come to see old hospitals as an enormous financial liability,37 and not necessarily the best way to take care of the mentally ill. The Health Service in this environment proposed to sell Friern Hospital.