Welcome to County Asylums v3.0
Seasons greetings from the County Asylums team!
Sorry if we’ve been quiet lately but we’ve very been busy behind the scenes doing a lot of work to the website. We’re going to use this blog post to summarise what we’ve been up to.
Version 3?
Yes, 3.0. We’re not quite into that web 3.0 thing thrown around were just terming this as the third incarnation of the website. If you’re not familiar with the history of the website let us give you a quick history lesson.
The first county asylums website was created by Pete all the way back in 2003. Pete visited a great many of the county asylums in either open or closed state. His photo collection of these asylums was unparalleled. It still is. Pete ran the site on his own until around 2012 when it sadly disappeared from the internet.
The original County Asylums website circa 2009
At this point a small group was formed with the idea of recreating or restoring the website.
However, none of us wanted to do this without first trying to contact Pete and get his blessing.
Thankfully not only did we get in contact with Pete but even better he wanted to help get the site back online. Over the next 2 years, as a team, we rebuilt the website from the ground up adding in pages for every county asylum and some of the more noteworthy other institutions of the era.
Since the relaunch of the site in 2014 we’ve been quietly adding more content in the form of photos, postcards, extra histories and a basic list of Scottish Asylums (they had their own act).
Around 18 months ago we realised that we had some major problems with the website.
The overall theme/look of the website was broken, all of the links to both the location of asylums and, more crucially, the links to where hospital records archived were also broken when the national archives took the hospitals database offline.
So WHAT’S new?
To the naked eye you’re probably looking at the website and thinking it hasn’t changed much. Well yes you are correct it hasn’t and that’s because we liked the look we created 10 years ago. The ‘new’ look is much the same as old one but it works with modern tech (we won’t bore you with the techy part) and more importantly works better with mobile/tablet devices which account of over 70% of our website traffic these days.
Improved Mapping/Location
When we rewrote county asylums ten years ago we, perhaps naively, used bing’s birds eye view for mapping at the time. These links broke a few years ago so this rewrite was the perfect time to change them.
All links now use google mapping and in some cases are improved in accuracy of where an asylum was located (where it isn’t obvious!)
Hospital Records
Over the last ten years we’ve received in excess of 10’000 emails of which probably 80% of are asking where they can find out why a relative was admitted or died at a particular asylum.
When we first rewrote the website ten years ago we created an info tab with links, where known, to where records were held. With the amount of emails we receive asking for where records are it’s since become obvious that we could make this information clearer to find (as much as we love your emails, we think you’ll prefer to just find the information straight to hand than having to wait for us to reply)
Two improvements have been made here:
- Firstly we’ve renamed the info tab to records/info so its more obvious but more importantly;
- We’ve looked up where every asylum records are currently held and detailed them on the page with a link on how to contact them.
We hope the national archives keep these links the same as we don’t want to change them again, at least not for another ten years at least (please).
Burial Grounds/Cemeteries
Having started rewriting the site back in 2023 we didn’t have any plans on adding information about asylum burial grounds. While we knew of some asylums that had onsite burial grounds we perhaps were not aware of just how many there were and how many people were buried within the grounds of many of the county asylums. It’s difficult to put a number on the amount of burials that have taken place on asylum grounds but it could easily be as many as 300-400’000 if not more.
The rewriting plans of the website changed in 2024 when we started talked to Kevin at The Friends of Horton Cemetery (https://hortoncemetery.org/) and realised that not only were there many more burial grounds/cemeteries than we thought but also that many were unloved, neglected and in the particular case of Horton subjected to a disgraceful decision by the local NHS trust many years ago.
We recommend you read the sorry story in the link above and lend support to them forcing the council to CPO the land.
1933 OS map showing Horton Cemetery
With us already committed to reworking the records tab on each asylum page and clearly not already having enough of a workload (note: sarcasm) we decided to embark on a rather morbid but equally eye opening deep dive into establishing how many and where exactly all these asylum burial grounds were.
The cemetery at St Augustine’s Asylum with its very noticeable burial plots
We’d known about a few beforehand – the well preserved examples such as Mendip and the almost completely forgotten ones like Talgarth – but our searches enabled us to identify 97 of the 119 county asylum burial sites. We will continue to research the remaining 22 currently unknown.
Some of the asylums used local parish cemeteries but many more simply buried onsite and in most cases it was with the help of old ordnance survey maps that helped us identify the exact location.
We’ve found that many local authority archives hold the burial registers and some are even helpfully published online.
You can find the burial information on the records/info tab.
We will stress that just because we’ve identified the burial sites on many of the asylums this doesn’t mean everybody was buried here. If a patient died and still had family it was up to them to decide what to do with the deceased. The vast majority of those buried on site was as a result of them simply being unclaimed/not having any family and thus a pauper burial was carried out.
The practice of onsite burial grounds seemed to stop after the creation of the NHS in the late 1940s. After this time it was more common for unclaimed bodies to be buried at a nearby parish/council cemetery. However some hospital cemeteries operated well into the 1970s.
Anything else ?
We’ve also reviewed our list of other asylums and crucially re-worked our list of Scottish Asylums to be far more accurate. We thank Dazza for all his help in correcting our errors! These pages are not fully finished/updated yet and we’ve a lot of photos and histories to add. We will do these in due course now that the major rewrite work has been completed.
We also have plenty of postcards, internal and external images to add to existing pages. Our goal for 2025 will be to simply improve on the content we already have. We thank each and everyone of you who’s provided info, images and postcards. Please keep them coming.
In the last ten years we’ve also been busy representing the website in various forms.
Ed has written a book all about the London County asylums. If you’ve not got a copy yet we suggest you do, its very good if we do say so ourselves.
Tom has worked with both the Whitchurch Historical Society and Swansea Bay NHS Heritage Groups as they commemorated the closure of both Whitchurch & Cefn Coed hospitals in recent years. The later, Cefn Coed closure, culminated with a 6 month exhibition of the hospitals life at Swansea Museum. He also has given talks about the county asylum act to local WI groups, historical groups and even the odd photographical group. (He’s happy to do more as long as he’s provided with ample supply of tea and cake.)
We’ve also worked with the Science Museum helping them with their new mental health exhibition and in particularly providing history and photos of pocock padded cells to accompany their original example that has been lovingly restored by the science museum team.
So thanks to all of you that has supported the website since its rebirth and we hope to continue to evolve the site over the coming years. While there is only a handful of the original county asylums left open (by our records it may even be as low as 5) there is always more to learn and crucially: share.
On behalf of the county asylum team we wish you happy christmas and a very prosperous 2025!