Incredible hospital ‘half the size of Buckingham Palace’ left to rot in UK countryside

It’s an extraordinary building that dominates the surrounding countryside despite having been empty and abandoned for decades. It’s clear to see how impressive, even beautiful, it would once have looked from the outside — but inside its walls a dark history played out.

Built over 20 acres of land, the North Hospital covers roughly half the amount of ground as the entire and Gardens site, a huge area which is now in ruin and has been since it finally closed its doors in 1995. It was used for nearly 150 years, first opened in Denbigh in 1848 as the North Wales Counties Lunatic Asylum. It was the product of an age when fear and stigma guided our “care” of the mentally ill, a time when isolation in an asylum was the treatment for conditions like postnatal depression, alcoholism, senile dementia and even infidelity.

Those whose only offence was to be ill were sometimes condemned to die in now decaying buildings like this, which certainly wasn’t the only one of its kind in the UK — and because many were privately owned, patients meant profits, so there was little incentive to discharge them.

Although it was opened in the middle of the 19th century to provide care for Welsh-speaking people with mental illnesses, the reality was that as many as 1,500 patients were crammed into the sprawling hospital, including children with learning disabilities, dementia patients, people with addictions and many with epilepsy, who lived alongside others with acute mental illness. It would be almost 80 years after it was opened before the introduction of even rudimentary mental health treatments.

And after they were admitted, the treatments used would surely have only made the vulnerable still more distressed. Highly toxic mercury was used on those deemed hysterical, and a chemical now used in fire retardants kept patients feeling sick, so they were less prone to violence.

Clwyd Wynne, who worked at the hospital for 30 years before it closed and has written a book on his experience, told Wales that overcrowding and staff shortages made conditions there “really tough”. He said: “They did used to think people were possessed, there’s no doubt about that. They hadn’t got a clue really what was going on.

“There was no form of treatment for mental illness up until the 1930s, really, so for the first 78 years or so of the hospital, the only treatments were employment and recreation.”

The reasons people ended up in asylums in Victorian Britain were often as sinister as the treatments themselves. Husbands who wanted rid of wives could get them into the facility — and it took only two doctors’ signatures to get rid of an inconvenient wife or rich eccentric relative. Relatives were known to have plotted to have them hauled off.

Infidelity was evidence of moral insanity so a woman could end up in the asylum for this reason, with poor working-class women among the most vulnerable. Mr Wynne’s research shows the youngest child in the hospital was a six-year-old with a learning disability.

Gill Fawk, an archivist with the Talgarth and District Historical Society, said: “People just didn’t understand the mind and we still don’t, do we? But even more so then. They were different and that was it – if you were different, you were stigmatised.”

Perhaps most shocking of all was a treatment that came long after the Victorian era: pre-frontal lobotomies saw part of the brain purposely damaged by severing nerves, and they are said to have been widespread at the hospital. The procedure was introduced in 1942, and within two years, 24 patients had been operated on at the hospital because they failed to respond to other treatments. But not before they had tried electric shock treatment, which had been introduced in 1941.

The lobotomy was performed by a local GP or surgeon, and one patient is known to have died before the treatment was phased out by the 1970s. Another form of treatment saw people with epilepsy put on a vegetarian diet in 1916.

Mr Wynne said that many World War One soldiers became patients and there were still about 50 there in the 1950s.

“They had been damaged by what had happened to them in the armed forces… there was no treatment for them then,” Mr Wynne said.

Other soldiers became patients after getting syphilis: “They ended up as what we called GPI — general paralysis of the insane — they ended up being in the hospital for many, many years,” said Mr Wynne.

In 1961, Enoch Powell, then the health secretary, announced the closure of Britain’s Victorian mental hospitals, though it was another 34 years before this one finally shut in 1995.

And now, these 180-year-old buildings, which have a Grade II* listed Gothic facade, may soon have a new chapter in their history. They have long been subject to a public inquiry around their future, and the derelict hospital was bought by the local council in 2018, ten years after a suspected arson attack saw a fire tear through its historic ballroom

A property developer plans to convert and restore the main buildings into 34 apartments in a redevelopment plan expected to take 12 years to complete at a cost of £107million.