Overview

Dreaded and reviled by many, Britain's nineteenth-century asylums provide a unique window on how the Victorians housed and treated the mentally ill. Despite initially good intentions, asylums became warehouses for society's outcasts, where cures were few. Hidden in the countryside, they could eventually be found throughout the British Empire, on the Continent and in North America, with 120 or so in England and Wales alone. Today many asylum buildings have gone or are threatened. Most have closed as hospitals since the 1980s, and either been demolished or turned into private homes, their original use forgotten. But the memory of them lives on as a fascinating part of Victorian life that survived into modern times. TheVictorian Asylum gives an insight into their history, their often imposing architecture and their later decline.

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Sarah Rutherford is a Kew-trained horticulturist who obtained an MA in the conservation of historic parks and gardens at York University. She later worked for English Heritage assessing sites across England for the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens, becoming Head of the Register. During this time she researched and completed her doctoral thesis on the landscapes of nineteenth-centuury lunatic asylums and visited many before they were closed and redeveloped. She is now an enthusiastic freelance consultant researching and writing conservation plans for parks and gardens.

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