Location - West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum

The location we have chosen to film our video is in the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum, which is now known as High Royds Hospital. We found this location by researching on websites such as Secret Leeds and Flickr. Also we discovered John, a security guard at Liberty Park (our student halls) worked there for 30 years and was happy to chat to us about his memories and experiences.

It also seemed a perfect location after discovering the Horror film Asylum was filmed there, along with a couple of television series.

The West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum was opened in 1888 and closed in 2003. Although there is building work going on some of the buildings are still accessible.

The history of this hospital interested me greatly as i have previously studied the Sociology of mental health.

Article from the Yorkshire Evening Post.

http://www.yorkshireeveningpost.co.uk/news/Memories-of-a-city-institution.1313987.jp

Memories of a city institution

New book reveals inner secrets of life in the building which was once the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum
by Vicki Robinson Health Reporter

ITS huge Victorian facade was a forbidding presence looming large on the horizon of a picturesque Yorkshire village.
And for those fortunate enough never to step through the doors of High Royds hospital in Menston, its inner workings always remained a mystery.
But now the secrets of the former West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum have finally been revealed in a book marking its 115 year history.
High Royds was one of the last remaining psychiatric hospitals of its kind still functioning when it shut its doors for the final time on February 25, 2003.
However, Splendid Isolation by local historian Andrew Bannister, pictured below right, tells how in the late 19th century High Royds was at the very forefront of "modern" mental health treatment.
Opening in 1888, it was the first dedicated institution for people "afflicted by madness". Previously most had been confined to asylums like London's Bethlem Hospital – from which the term Bedlam sprang – where patients would literally be kept in chains.
Admissions
High Royds was built at the foot of Rombalds Moor, the 300-acre site having been bought by the West Riding Justices from Mr Ascough Fawkes, of Farnley Hall, for around £18,000.
Built in solid stone at a cost of £350,000, no expense was spared to make a very grand impression.
Architects drafted in a huge turreted structure, the centrepiece of which was the 129-foot tower and its four-dial clock – which can still be seen across the Wharfedale landscape.
Among the facilities were laundries, drying rooms, a bakery, a fire engine house, mortuary and staff accommodation. Gas was piped from the works at Yeadon and the water supply was secured by the hospital's own spring-fed reservoir.
The first buildings were designed to accommodate 840 patients with plans for another 600. Wards were designated according to the cruel labelling of the day: the able-bodied; imbeciles; idiots; dangerous lunatics and the mentally convalescent.
People from all walks of life were admitted to the asylum and a list of patients in 1891 reveals the occupations. Whilst the majority were labourers (45), or those with no occupation (17), there were many other jobs represented, including six mechanics, four miners, four quarrymen, three woollen spinners, three warp dressers, three tailors, three schoolmasters and six clerks. Among the single recorded admissions were a journalist; landed proprietor; professor of music; policeman; pawnbroker; and solicitor.
The only exercise for the most serious cases – those known for extreme violence – was a walk around a yard known as the "bullring".
But life could be equally grim for the lesser cases, too.
The discharge rate in the early years was only 30 per cent of the annual admissions and death rates were as high as 15 per cent a year.
The patients were often buried in unmarked graves, with 900 of them in a mass unmarked grave in Guiseley cemetery.
By 1905, the hospital had come up with its own solution – acquiring its own graveyard next to the railway line. This melancholy place is still the final resting ground of 2,858 pauper lunatics.
Four separate farms were constructed around the site to enable High Royds to become something of a self-sufficient community. The hospital even had its own shire horses to help plough the fields and dairy products came from a flock of Ayrshire heifers.
War
Attitudes to mental illness, were, thankfully, to change over the years and in 1923, the Pauper Lunatic Asylum was renamed the West Riding Mental Hospital at Menston.
Conditions for patients were improving, too, and each ward now had a pet canary, a piano and the male wards also had billiard tables.
In 1924, wireless sets were installed and the hospital got its first cinematograph and in the 1930s, electric light was installed to the whole building.
By 1936, occupational therapy had come into being and many patients were for the first time considered voluntary.
When war broke out in 1939, High Royds played an important role. A six-hutted emergency hospital opened to deal with 450 sick and wounded. In 1940, the first convoy of soldiers from France arrived and the facility was also used to provide short-term accommodation for refugees.
During the war, convulsant therapy using drugs had been replaced by electro-convulsive therapy (ECT), which was widely used, particularly in patients with depressive illnesses.
Important, too, was the new range of drugs like chlorpromazine and other anti-depressants.
In 1961, attitudes to mental hospitals had irrevocably changed.
The then Minister of Health, Enoch Powell described a desire to see scaling down of the huge Victorian institutions – "isolated, majestic, brooded over by the gigantic watertower and chimney combined, rising unmistakable out of the country."
Financial pressures were to play a part too, as the Government realised how costly psychiatric hospitals were to run on such a grand scale.
On January 1, 1963, the changes began – with the hospital being renamed again, this time as High Royds. Modernisation got underway and specialist units were built for children and the elderly and patient overcrowding began to reduce.
It was the 1970s, though, which probably saw the most change with the emergence of care in the community, day centres, sheltered housing schemes and local psychiatric nursing. In the 1990s it was finally decided to close High Royds and replace the hospital with smaller, locally-based facilities.
In 1996, Aire Court was built at Middleton, south Leeds, as a community unit. Millside Community Unit in Leeds and Towngate House Community Unit in Guiseley soon followed, along with Millfield House in Yeadon.
High Royds was in a definite state of decline and featured in a series of YEP articles which declared a "crisis in mental health care".
Leisure
Responding to sustained criticism the then Leeds Community and Mental Health Services NHS Trust launched a £50m plan to build nine new mental health facilities across the city.
By 2003, all of those had opened and High Royds was languishing empty.
And there it still remains, although soon it may be unrecognisable as a former lunatic asylum – planning permission has been granted and work is underway on a major residential and leisure complex.
The main part of the asylum, including the famous clock, is now a listed building and will remain.