Visiting The Pastures asylum
The other day I took a trip to Mickleover Derby to see the site of the Pastures asylum which was closed in 1994 and has since been converted to housing. Few of the buildings of old mental health asylums still stand so it was a privilege to see the asylum still standing.
Plans for a Derby County Asylum began in 1844, just before the County Asylums Act of 1845 would make the building of an asylum madatory, with the selection of a Committee to oversee the project.
A 70 acre site just outside the Derbyshire village of Mickleover was selected for a building with 360 beds for pauper lunatics, and after the submission of various designs, and some unwise back-tracking on projected patient numbers forced by the Lunacy Commission, who also objected to the “unnecessary ornamentation” of the plans, Henry Duesbury’s design for a 300-capacity asylum was accepted from an unusually large number of submissions (around 80), with building work beginning in Spring 1848. Duesbury had beaten bids by more established asylum designers (such as William Moffat) but had more ties to Derbyshire, having completed the Derby Guild Hall buildings in 1842.
Although not fully completed until 1853, the first patient, Jabez Jackson, was admitted from the grim Derby Union Workhouse on 21st August 1851, into an asylum whose first Superintendent, Dr John Hitchman, adopted the humane treatment model which he would have used in his previous role as Superintendent of the female side of the Middlesex County Asylum (aka Hanwell/St Bernard’s) where the model was already being practiced. Patients at Pastures were to enjoy a more humane, open and self-determinate regime than many asylums had adopted at this early stage. Indeed, Dr John Connelly, the widely influential Superintendent of Hanwell had advised the Derbyshire Committee on the designs and cited the building as the first example of a County Asylum having been “in almost every material point accordant with the principles maintained” in his seminal book which covered the subject in microscopic detail.
تعليقات