The project The building of Claybury Hospital was commissioned by the Middlesex Court of Magistrates in 1887 and would eventually become the fifth Middlesex County Asylum. The site was situated on the brow of a hill and was surrounded by of ancient woodland and of open parkland, ponds, pasture and historic gardens. These had been designed in 1789 by the landscape architect
Humphry Repton.
Early years In 1889 the uncompleted building passed to the newly created
London County Council which opened it in 1893 as the Claybury Lunatic Asylum. Armstrong-Jones held progressive views on community care, advocating in 1906 that city hospitals should have out-patient departments where patients could seek help for mental symptoms without loss of liberty. Each asylum should be a centre for clinical instruction where all medical practitioners could refresh their understanding of insanity. People showing early signs of insanity should be free to seek advice and if necessary be admitted on a voluntary basis and not have to wait until they became certifiable. The first voluntary patients could not admitted until 1930 when the
Mental Treatment Act was passed. In 1895, the London County Council appointed
Frederick Mott as director for their new research laboratory at Claybury. Over the next 19 years he carried out vast research, documented in his
Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry published between 1903 and 1922. He was knighted in 1919 and is particularly remembered for helping to establish that '
general paralysis of the insane (GPI) was due to
syphilis.
Helen Boyle was appointed as an Assistant Medical Officer in 1895, one of the first women to be employed as a doctor in an asylum. She became a pioneer of early treatment for the mentally ill and went on to found the Lady Chichester Hospital. In 1939 she became the first female president of the
Royal Medico-Psychological Association (now the
Royal College of Psychiatrists). In Pryor's words: "The work of this 'lady doctor' formed part of the pale new dawn of community care for the mentally ill." The asylum was renamed Claybury Mental Hospital in 1930 and simplified to Claybury Hospital in 1959. In the course of his illness he produced several pictures that depicted his mental state. Before leaving Claybury in 1938, the medical superintendent, Guy Barham, agreed to him painting a large mural covering three walls of the canteen. A photograph of this painting was rediscovered circa 2015. He became an official war artist during World War II. From the mid-1950s Claybury again attracted widespread attention as, led by consultants Denis Martin and John Pippard, it pioneered a controversial
therapeutic community approach to an entire institution of over 2,700 people. In 1968, Martin described the development of Claybury's therapeutic community in
Adventure in Psychiatry. In 1972 a collection of essays by staff members and edited by Elizabeth Shoenberg were published under the title,
A Hospital Looks at Itself: The three pronged attack of therapeutic community techniques, use of new drugs and minimal use of the physical treatments, led to a reduction of the patient population from 2,332 in 1950 to 1,537 in 1970. However, lack of community care resulted in the 'revolving door syndrome' with over half admissions being re-admissions. From the late 1940s it became increasingly difficult to recruit student nurses and other support staff from the UK. Many, with little English, were recruited from Europe and given English language tuition. In 1962,
Enoch Powell, then
Minister of Health, proposed that hospitals should seek recruits from the West Indies and Pakistan. By 1968 there were 47 nationalities represented at Claybury with different ethnic, religious and linguistic backgrounds, all part of the therapeutic community diversity. The number of patients on Claybury's statuary books at the year end in 1980 was 1,057 and in 1990 was 429. For some long-stay patients, thoroughly institutionalised, Claybury had been both home and local village for decades, in some cases for over 40 years. The challenge to manage their rehabilitation in a new environment, that they had never experienced and might well treat them with suspicion, was immense. In 1988 the Health and Social Services Research Unit at South Bank Polytechnic published a research paper detailing the post-discharge experience of a group of former long-stay Claybury patients.
Closure To mark its centenary in 1993, the Forest Healthcare Trust published a comprehensive and well documented history of the hospital entitled,
Claybury, A Century of Caring, written by Eric Pryor who had been a member of the nursing staff since 1948. With the
Care in the Community Programme and the planned decline in patient numbers, the Claybury site faced a difficult future. The
NHS pressed for extensive demolition and maximum new build, whereas the
Local Planning Authority and
English Heritage argued for maximum retention of the historic buildings and restriction of new build to the existing footprint, in accordance with the
Green Belt allocation in the
Unitary Development Plan. The hospital was closed in 1997.
Repton Park After the hospital was shut down in 1997 it was converted into
gated housing by
Crest Nicholson (working closely with English Heritage and the
London Wildlife Trust) and renamed Repton Park. Former residents of Repton Park include singers
V V Brown and
Simon Webbe and actress
Patsy Palmer. Properties have also attracted professional footballers from
Arsenal and
Spurs. == See also ==