Hellingly Hospital (The Lost Asylum), England
Sitting on top of a hill oversight
the East Sussex Countryside sits the battered remnant of Hellingly hospital,
Formerly Hellingly Asylum. If the name of this English hospital isn’t enough to
persuade you of its creepiness consider the fact that it’s not really a
hospital at all. It’s actually an insane asylum; or rather it
was an insane asylum before being abandoned several years ago. It was built
close to the small village of Hellingly, in South West England.
That East Sussex County Asylum of
Hellingly was designed by leading Victorian architect GT Hine and built to a
late Victorian design during a period of huge extension for mental health
facilities in Britain.it was built with the concept that relaxing views and
extreme isolation were beneficial to psychological cure, the asylum's remote
location was to provide the patients with a relaxed and isolated setting (ideal
for rehabilitation) and to create a world far removed from the officious eyes
of daily life outside the hospital walls.
Somehow something went 'wrong' with
the design of Hellingly, and Hine produced the plans for a spectacularly decorated
theatre, maybe something to do with the hospital being towards the end of his
career or maybe he just woke up in a frivolous mood that day. Hellingly's main
hall remains the hospital's centerpiece, an adjoining point at which every
sprawling corridor can find its way from.
Patients & staff used to live
under the same roof in the many red bricks buildings linked by closed hallways,
and offering "therapeutic" and relaxing views on the surrounding
quiet and green countryside.
The hospital, as with most from the
Victorian era, was fully self-sufficient and the hospital's program ensured
that patients from all over the site were allocated various jobs in the
hospital such as the farming, laundry work or grounds keeping. An onsite
railway station with an electric tramway provided the hospital with additional
supplies and visitors but was closed in the 1950s due to high upkeep costs.
The capacity of the hospital was
originally deemed at 700 patients, although wards were packed with 1,250 by
1955. The overcrowded conditions led to beds in hallways and a general decline
in the quality of care, until the Mental Health Act of 1959.
A medium-security unit called Ashen
Hill was added in the mid-1980s; however the main hospital campus was slowly
closing. It was eventually shuttered in 1994 with the exception of Ashen Hill.
A housing complex eventually replaced the abandoned hospital around 2012.
The Hospital today has suffered
over 10 years of remissness badly; arson has destroyed several buildings most remarkable
the administration block. Vandals have been removing all the windows; the
easier to access ground floor areas have received the brunt of these attacks.
Despite the harshness of destruction
and chaos systematically inflicted on the buildings by time and man, but a few
hidden gems tucked away in remote parts of the site still remain.
