Friends of Wandsworth Common — Heritage Talk · 28 May 2024
The Surrey Pauper Lunatic Asylum, 1841 to the present day
Welcome, everyone, and a warm welcome to all those who have come through the Heritage Festival this evening. We have the great pleasure of welcoming Philip Boy, our local historian with an extraordinarily universal knowledge of Wandsworth Common. Tonight he's going to be talking to us about the early years of the Springfield Asylum, so I shall pass you over to Philip.
Thank you. Not just about the early years — that was the original idea, and it's mostly about the earlier period, but I'll bring it up to today. In fact I'll start with the modern period, because of course we have a new park: the most recent park in London, quite large at 30-odd acres, known to us as Springfield Hospital. Times have changed — we don't use words like lunatic, madwoman, and idiot any more, as you will unfortunately hear in a bit. They meant it very kindly, I'm sure.
I started taking an interest during lockdown when I began walking through Springfield Hospital. I'd always been told by my children not to go in there, partly because their own friends had been treated there for various reasons. It's a very complex institution — but the institution I'm going to be talking about was somewhat simpler.
What you can see now is the characteristic front of Springfield Hospital, or the Pauper Lunatic Asylum as it was. When I first started looking at it, around 2010, it was a golf course. Then the builders moved in, and I started to try to find out what was happening. It's called the 1840 — for reasons which will become increasingly clear, because in the brickwork of that centrepiece it says in figures about 10 feet high: 1840. To the developers, that means really modern — not like the old days — which is very important in terms of what they want this place to be.
When I looked at the artist's impressions for the development, I noticed certain things. You see kites flying, people playing cricket, people lounging about, children everywhere, runners, cyclists. It's a very convivial environment. Obviously it's selling a utopian vision. And my argument, my thesis, is this: they are desperate not to tell people that this was a lunatic asylum for poor people. This is instead being presented as an oasis for relatively affluent people.
The artist's impressions are actually quite accurate — deer wander through, nature is everywhere, the old airing courts where men and women were walked in circles have been transformed into gardens. The chapel has been beautifully retained, and nearby new clinical facilities look like a fairly luxurious hotel. On the wall of one of them it says: "Hope for a better tomorrow." The subliminal message throughout is: this is safe, particularly safe for women — you can walk around at night. Somehow embedded in the unconscious of these images is a memory, always suppressed, of the origins of the institution.
In the sales brochures for the residential development — the 1840 — the visual language being spoken is one of heritage, nature, and luxury. There is exactly one page that explicitly addresses the history of the place, and as befits history it's in black and white while all the others are glossy colour. And nowhere — nowhere — does it say this was a lunatic asylum for poor people.
There's one rather striking image: an artist's impression of the cemetery. There isn't a single cross or angel in it. It looks like parkland. "Your own private oasis" — "oasis" is rather like the word "asylum," isn't it? "A unique sense of place." And in the promotional videos, which are targeted at Hong Kong and Dubai, they press all the buttons: Wimbledon, Battersea, culinary delights, well connected to London. There is an implicit message of stately homes — and there are reasons for that, as we shall see.
Incidentally: it really is worth going. The park is remarkable, and the buildings — done up in red brick with stone dressing and those lovely leaded panes in the windows — are quite handsome now.
Your idea — probably mine too — of what life in a madhouse was like comes from places like Bethlehem Hospital, "Bedlam." These were privately owned institutions to which local vestries and organisations would send their insane for a fee. In the case of Bethlehem, affluent people could also pay to come in and laugh at the lunatics, which helped fund the place. Hogarth's The Rake's Progress shows the characteristic treatment of the late 18th and early 19th centuries: the patient is restrained, locked up, padlocked in. There are ghastly stories about the ways in which people were bound.
That is not what the Surrey Asylum was about.
The Surrey Asylum was inspired by the writings of W.A.F. Browne — What Asylums Were, Are, and Ought to Be, published in 1837. There was a growing movement in the early 19th century, and some people around here were actually pioneers in it. Wilberforce, who lived just on the other side of the common, was very active in what you might call the movement for better treatment of the insane.
Browne's vision was a utopian one. It called for humane or moral treatment; an end to degrading physical restraint and the punitive use of emetics and laxatives; a calm rural location to remove patients from urban stresses and excitements; and "bucolic views from high on hills, with land sloping gently away." Does that not describe this site rather well? The document continues: "such a view of nature will provide a tether to reminiscences of freedom and family to which the heart still clings." And finally: "cultivated soil to allow for the growing of crops and livestock with a view to self-sufficiency; efficient sources of warmth in winter; cool conditions in summer; an abundant supply of clean, refreshing water." In short:
The needs of pauper lunatics were no different from those of the most affluent local aristocrats.
Remember, just across the Wandle from Springfield was Earl Spencer's Wimbledon Park, and all around were quite large houses, as the Lost Houses project has been demonstrating. This was outrageous — poor people being looked after well, in fact much better than they would have been in their crowded garrets.
Looking at a map from 1640, you can see Garrett Green clearly marked out. If you look closely, there's a little house — almost nothing else anywhere — and that is what became Springfield House and Springfield Park. A map from 1787 shows a cluster of buildings there, with fields all the way up to Trinity Road. At that time the fields were owned and farmed by two different families: one at the top, one at the bottom.
By the early 19th century — around 1810 to 1820 — Henry Perkins acquired the land, renting and eventually buying it from Earl Spencer. The Spencers were always running out of cash and always selling off bits of land, though they retained their manorial status. They collected the set: Wimbledon first, then Wandsworth, Allfarthing, and Battersea. But they thought of these areas purely as a source of revenue.
Perkins was part of a large brewery empire. He got fed up with living in London and wanted to live in Dover — and just at the right moment the Surrey magistrates decided they wanted to build an asylum. They needed a large estate: countryfied, on a hill, with lovely views ideally down to water, and a plentiful water supply. There was never actually a plentiful water supply here, which caused a lot of problems; but everything else fitted.
What they built in 1839–1840, opening in June 1841, looked very much like Hampton Court. It was very grand and very deliberate: the architecture evoked a stately home, partly to match the Browne notion of treating pauper lunatics as well as the most affluent aristocrats. It's remarkable how similar the front looks today, nearly two centuries later.
The original structure is what's called a corridor pattern — not very deep anywhere, lots and lots of corridors with places for people to walk on the outside. Very cunningly, rather than a wall around the perimeter, they used a ha-ha: a ditch with a wall at the bottom, so that people couldn't get out, but their view was completely uninterrupted. The view, remember, was considered critical. If you go there today you can still see, on the Ordnance Survey maps and on the ground, where a number of these ha-has were dug out.
It was built for 200 patients — rather more women than men, because the ideology of the time held that women were more prone to mental distress on account of being "the weaker sex," susceptible to the effects of childbirth, menstruation, and so on.
Within a few decades it began to expand. Wings were put on at the back — unfortunately there weren't just 200 mad people in Surrey; there were a hundred more every year, then two hundred more, and the expectation that people would recover within two years gave way to the reality of long-term mental illness requiring what you might call warehousing. Surrey eventually decided to build large specialist institutions elsewhere — at Epsom and at Tooting Bec — and the Springfield site was sold to Middlesex County. So although the maps will say "County Lunatic Asylum (Surrey)" up to a point, after 1888 it was called "County Lunatic Asylum (Middlesex)" — which is strange, since Middlesex is north of the river, but that's how it was.
By 1868 the building was getting more complicated, with bigger wings at the back still featuring the original battlements to give it the look of a castle. Whether that was to keep people out or keep people in — or both — I'm not sure. By 1894 the structure is substantially larger, with a chapel added around 1890.
There is also a miniature version of the main building, now called the Elizabeth Newton Wing. This was the annex for what were then called "idiot children" — a term that sounds objectionable to us, but there was a progressive aspect to it at the time. The argument was that people with severe congenital disorders were being thrown together with patients who might convalesce and recover — and an extraordinary number of people did recover in a short time — but those with permanent disabilities needed to be treated separately, and actively helped. The unit was built partly due to the advocacy of Dr Langdon Down, of Down's syndrome — he was on the committee and pressured for its development; his own grandchild had the condition. During the First World War this building was used for soldiers suffering from shell shock and other psychological trauma, just as the Third London General Hospital across the common took those with physical wounds.
The patients worked the land. Men worked on the farm; women — though this is less documented — sewed shirts and made clothing, which was sold in London to raise money for the institution. The farm occupied the land around what had become the old Springfield house and Garrett Green. A map from 1891 shows the new wings going up at the back and the farm visible at the front, with Garrett Green still just discernible as part of the common.
An aerial photograph from around the 1950s shows the hospital still essentially in a rural landscape: the water tower, the chimney, the chapel, most of the development behind the original building rather than in front. There were, remarkably, reports in the press of the farm having "the best pigs — certainly the closest pigs to Piccadilly." But in the 1950s it was decided the farm should go. In its place they built Garrett Green School for Girls, to which the girls transferred from what had been called Honeywell Secondary School, housed in the Royal Victoria Patriotic Asylum across the common.
If you're walking through the park, it's worth noticing that right in the middle is an ice house, left over from the 18th century. The developers promised to restore it, and there it is, visible from the park.
I want to give you just the headlines from some of the stories I've found, as there isn't time for more.
In spite of the very best endeavours of everybody, the place had a reputation. A Mrs Boon went to visit her husband and was told, almost in passing, that he had died. She asked where he was buried. "In Wandsworth graveyard" — not Magdalen Road, but the one on Garrett Lane. She went to find the grave. There was no grave. Eventually she was told he had been buried near her, back in Southwark. She went there. There was no grave there either. Eventually she found the traces of one. The undertaker refused to open it. She bribed another undertaker to dig up the body — and he was in pieces. His body had been stolen and sold to the medical schools to be cut up. This was not an uncommon practice.
There were visitors' accounts — wonderful stories of people running hares-and-hounds races right through the middle of the lunatic asylum, starting at Roehampton, getting chased off by furious doctors and, it was said, by the patients themselves.
A balloon landed here, a stunt organised by a man called Hugh Welch Diamond. Diamond ran the female department and got into a great deal of trouble.
Diamond was a great pioneering photographer, and this is where the story becomes nationally significant. He took photographs of his patients — most of them around 1851, so some of the very earliest photographs ever taken — and these are now in art collections around the world. When I first showed them in a talk, I asked people who they thought these women were. The answer is: they are patients from the lunatic asylum.
They are remarkable images. They are wearing institutional clothing — though not all of them. Diamond nearly always poses them to reflect what he believes their mental condition to be. This one is captioned "religious maniac." Many of the women are suffering from postpartum depression, infant loss, or birth trauma. Some look deeply suspicious; some have obvious congenital disorders; some have a sense of humour.
One of his most famous photographs shows a woman with plaited hair, a crown, and flowers, posed to represent Ophelia from Hamlet. I believe — and I'm quite willing to be wrong — that she is actually a woman called Amelia Aldrey, who tried to drown herself and her two young children in the Beverley Brook, on the northern edge of Wandsworth Common. Everything fits: she was in the institution at the time the photograph was taken; I found her name in the lunatic register; and she looks about the right age. She was only in there for a relatively short time, then out again, then back at Peckham House (a private madhouse), then Camberwell, and finally she died in the workhouse on East Hill at the age of 44.
Diamond also tried to show, through photography, how patients could get better. A series of photographs shows the same woman progressing from melancholia through excitement through convalescence to recovery. We know she has recovered because she is wearing a bonnet — in the 19th century, wearing a bonnet meant you were ready for the outside world, ready to be a public person. Any woman who appeared in court for theft or prostitution and didn't wear a bonnet would be pointed out by the press as showing her unfitness for society.
The sad postscript to Diamond's story is that he was involved in the death of a patient called Daniel Dolly, a mole-catcher. Dolly struck a doctor called Dr Snape, and Snape lost his temper and ordered him to be treated with gallons and gallons of ice-cold water for half an hour. Dolly died. Diamond performed an autopsy, removed the heart, and took it around various London doctors asking whether this was a man with a feeble heart who was always going to die. They said no. Diamond was so distressed that he simply burned the heart — and got into a great deal of trouble as a result. Dr Snape, meanwhile, continued to be a great enthusiast for water treatment until the British Medical Journal denounced him.
Diamond's photographs are now in art collections around the world and highly regarded as works of art. Paradoxically, because of that status people tend to look at them as art objects rather than as documents of real people in the middle of the 19th century. One of them has become the stock image of Victorian madness in American books; you can buy her face on a coffee mug for $10, or on a tote bag, or as a baby-grow. It's slightly troubling — for all we know, she had suffered an infant death.
During the Second World War, bombs didn't hit the main structures — extraordinarily — but they did fall in the grounds. By this time, although the building was originally constructed for 200 patients, there were 2,100. They sheltered in the undercroft or crypt, and many caught dysentery — a particular form of it, Entamoeba histolytica, that came to be known as the Springfield strain. All of the people who contracted it had to be isolated for the rest of their lives, as they were carriers and could not be cured.
The photographs taken by urban explorers who got into the empty building in the 1990s and 2000s give you a sense of what it was like in its final derelict years. There is the old ballroom. There are the ward name plates: women's wards were all named after flowering plants; men's wards after trees. And then there are the patient records — vast volumes, all mouldering, all falling apart. Whatever knowledge we might have gained from them about the lives of the people who lived in these institutions has just been eaten away.
The institution didn't close — it transformed. Starting from 200 to 250 patients, it grew to nearly 2,000, and then thanks to drugs like Largactil and the whole panoply of psychiatric medication, people were "decarcerated" as the fashionable phrase had it. The relatively simple model of everyone thrown together has given way to 30 specialist clinics on the site dealing with eating disorders, child and adolescent mental health services, specialist deaf mental health services, and much else.
Those services are still there, in the new buildings funded by the developers. And the new thinking is, in a strange way, a throwback to the very origins of the institution: that people who are mentally distressed ought to be among others, and vice versa — that integration matters, that community matters, and that care in the community is better than incarceration. Which is rather what W.A.F. Browne was saying in 1837.
Was it just women who suffered? You barely mentioned men.
The reason I didn't mention men very much is that I don't know very much about them — and the reason for that is that Hugh Welch Diamond was in charge of the women's department, while a Dr Snape controlled the men's. It was Snape, of course, who caused Daniel Dolly's death, and the British Medical Journal was furious about his enthusiasm for water treatment. But much less is generally known about the male patients, simply because Diamond took those extraordinary photographs of the women, and the women's experience has consequently been much more written about.
What was the area that is now the Shared Community Garden? Was it an airing court?
It was either an airing court — the walled areas where patients were walked in circles, men on one side, women on the other — or it could have been a horticultural garden. They needed both. I believe the men were on the right and the women on the left, but I don't know that for certain. It's a good question because the area is larger than a typical airing court, which suggests it may have had a different purpose.
Apart from Louis Wain, are there other notable people who were patients?
There is a very fine woman artist — whose name I'm ashamed to say has slipped my mind — who was in and out of the institution for much of her life, and remarkably continued to draw throughout. There are hundreds and thousands of images of her experience and observations. She has exhibitions held of her work and was quite recently still alive. I'm also very interested to hear about Louis Wain — I know very little about him specifically in relation to Springfield, and will look it up.
When did it stop being a lunatic asylum?
It's still open, in a sense. It never fully closed. The old model of everyone thrown in together gradually gave way to the current model of 30 or so specialist clinics. The National Health Service took over in 1948. The word "asylum" persisted well into the 20th century here — the Royal Victoria Patriotic Asylum got rid of the word and called itself the Royal Victoria Patriotic School in the 19th century, but this remained an asylum in name until after the Second World War.
What about all those patient records that were left mouldering in the empty building? Shouldn't they have been preserved?
There are some patient records in the London Metropolitan Archive and some in the Surrey Archive at Guildford. But there is a complication: until the National Health Service in 1948, patient notes were, in effect, the private property of the doctor — the psychiatrist, as they came to be called — who took them away when they left. They were not institutional property. The staff weren't even called nurses in the early period — they were Keepers or Attendants. So the records were never as systematically kept as one might hope. It's also worth noting that medical records don't have to be kept indefinitely by law — and for obvious reasons of patient confidentiality, public access to them is restricted.
Do we know anything about the "idiot children" in the Elizabeth Newton Wing — who they were and what happened to them?
I don't know why it's called Elizabeth Newton, or who Elizabeth Newton was. But there was an extraordinary woman psychiatrist called Joan Bicknell who championed the interests of children with what we would now call genetic or perinatal disorders. She really stood out for their care. And as I mentioned, the wing was built partly through the advocacy of Dr Langdon Down — of Down's syndrome — who was on the committee and whose own grandchild had the condition. It was a genuinely progressive initiative for its time: the idea that these children deserved separate, specialised, active care rather than being warehoused with everyone else.
Who took those photographs of the derelict building?
Naughty people on the internet — not the dark web, I hasten to say. Urban explorers who got in in the 1990s and early 2000s and took photographs and videos. Some of them are quite sensational in tone — the comments are all "wow, that really did my head in" — but the photographs themselves are often very good.
Are there books on Springfield in particular?
The superintendent in the 1980s wrote a pamphlet called Springfield Hospital: A Short Guide or something similar — terrific, though it has almost nothing about the patient experience. For the broader context, I very much like Andrew Scull's books on madness, and Roy Porter has written well on the subject. There is probably more literature on the Epsom and Banstead institutions, which were larger and better documented. But this earlier period is really rather lost in the mists of time. Someone ought to write it up properly.
A comment from an occupational therapy student in the early 1980s:
I went on placement to an extension of Springfield around 1982 and saw medical records of patients who had been sectioned 50 years earlier because they had become pregnant while unmarried. Their annual review notes said, year after year, "simple, childish and unintelligent." That continued for years and years. Very, very recent change.
Would there have been educational facilities?
In the original specifications, yes: reading, discussion and learning were part of the model, and there was a ballroom, theatrical performances, dances. The bit I had to skip over was a lovely account by a visitor from London who arrived at Wandsworth Common station in the dark, got lost, and eventually stumbled through the grounds to find a theatrical performance being put on in the 1880s — by the local great and good, not as far as I know by the patients. There was a model of socialisation. How much formal education there was, I honestly don't know, and I wish I did.
What I can say is that it wasn't true that everybody who went in stayed in for ever. A lovely study by a Dr Aziz of patient records from 1867–68 showed that more than half the patients were there for less than two years — they needed to convalesce, to rest, and then they left. That seems to have been true of Amelia Alfrey: she was in there for a short period, then out, then found herself in Peckham House, then Camberwell. She needed respite, not permanent incarceration.
A comment on the improvement in patient outcomes at the new Springfield:
When the Wandsworth Society organised a tour of the hospital, we were told that incidents requiring patients to be physically restrained had massively reduced since the move to the new building. Which is a perfect demonstration of what Browne and his contemporaries said would happen: that many of the worst symptoms — the anger, the violence, the deep depression — were actually caused by the institutionalisation itself, by the treatment, or the lack of it. This place was a pioneer in doing away with straitjackets, manacles, and other restraints. And that approach, it seems, is still bearing fruit.
We've only just skimmed the surface — there are clearly many more stories to be told. It strikes me, as Julia said, that it's fascinating to tour the hospital and the grounds and hear the philosophy behind the development: the desire to integrate mental health services into the wider community and to do away with the stigma of mental illness. If you'd like to hear more from Philip, he writes a monthly blog called The Chronicles of the Common — if you'd like to be put on the email list, please leave your address with him. All that remains is to thank Philip very much indeed.
Claude writes:
This was Philip's most free-ranging talk of the four — he ranges from a critique of the modern developers' brochures right back to 1640 and forward again to the present day, with diversions into photography, body-snatching, Hogarth, and William Wilberforce along the way.
I've organised it into clear sections while keeping the thread of his argument intact: the central idea that the 19th-century asylum was conceived as a genuine utopia for paupers, and that the 21st-century developers are, in their own way, reprising the same rhetoric without ever quite acknowledging what they're building on.
The Q&A runs long and is particularly interesting — the contributions from the audience member who visited South Africa in 1978 and the occupational therapy student from the 1980s are well worth preserving in full.