A History of London County Lunatic Asylums & Mental Hospitals

A history of London's mental health care system from medieval times to the 20th century.

From the Middle-Ages onwards, London’s notorious Bedlam lunatic hospital saw the city’s “mad” locked away in dank cells, neglected and abused and without any real cure and little comfort. The unprecedented growth of the metropolis after the Industrial Revolution saw a perceived ‘epidemic’ of madness take hold, with county asylums seen as the most humane or cost-effective way to offer the mass confinement and treatment believed necessary.

The county of Middlesex would build and open three county asylums from 1831, and when London became its own county in 1889 it would adopt all three and go on to build or run another eight such institutions. Each operated much like a self-contained town, often incorporating railways, laundries, farms, gardens, medical facilities and more, in order to ensure patients never needed to leave the asylum’s grounds.

Reflecting on the long and storied histories of these institutions—from their planning and construction to the treatments and regimes to the lives of patients and staff as well as the hospitals' use during wartime and the modernization that began in the 20th century, this volume documents the history of London's mental health hospital from opening to eventual closure, abandonment, redevelopment, or destruction.