A History of London County Lunatic Asylums & Mental Hospitals by Ed Brandon

Author:Ed Brandon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Europe / Great Britain / General
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2022-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

Cane Hill’s clock tower after closure. (Photograph copyright Marlon Bones)

Doubtless many visitors came throughout the 1990s as the site deteriorated and never told of what they found there, nor what they took away from the site; there were rumours of entire rooms full of old staff uniforms, straitjackets, the whistles once carried by attendants, etc., all of course stolen long ago. More thorough documentation by those visiting the site began in the early 2000s, as the improvements in digital photography saw a greater number of images begin to emerge online, and the most ardent online documentarian of Cane Hill – both in terms of its history as well as its afterlife – is undoubtedly Simon Cornwell, who through his eponymous website has gradually built up a wonderful record of its history as well as his own frequent visits, complete with a wealth of his photographs.

His images and summaries of his trips were a significant factor in the development of the UK ‘urban exploration’ scene and attracted many more visitors to Cane Hill, and his concept of ‘the cult of Cane Hill’ nicely sums up the fascination and mythology which developed in regard to the site. Cornwell picks the buildings apart in minute detail, noting numerous easily missed differences between one ward or area and the next, making Cane Hill one of the most carefully studied and well-documented of all the county asylums to enter a similar period of abandonment – a valuable task no formal body had been bothered to conduct. Ali Costelloe’s later canehill.org website also hosts an exhaustive wealth of information including some fascinating memories shared by former staff and patients, adding an additional ‘human’ angle.

In 1994, the band Big Audio Dynamite (featuring Mick Jones, formerly of The Clash, as well as the DJ, musician, and film director Don Letts) shot two of their music videos – Looking For a Song and Psycho Wing – at the empty asylum; both can be found online and feature some interesting images of the buildings both inside and out.

As time went on, additional associations were dug up; for example, the actor Michael Caine’s half-brother was a long-term resident at Cane Hill. His mother kept her illegitimate child a secret from the rest of the family (despite her visiting him there every single week for over fifty years), and Caine himself did not find out about his existence until around 2001 after a journalist happened upon the story after interviewing several patients, one of whom happened to be his half-brother’s girlfriend.

The musician David Bowie had occasionally talked about his half-brother Terry Burns’ mental illness in relation to his own life and work, but the connections to Cane Hill – where Terry was admitted several times and where he spent the last four years of his life – were not so apparent or scrutinised until Cane Hill acquired notoriety decades later. Terry was a huge influence on Bowie’s formative years as well as his taste in music, and was somewhat idolised by him until Terry’s schizophrenia made their relationship more complicated.

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