All over the UK dotted throughout countryside and city alike lie abandoned asylums, relics of a bygone era of mental health where the aim was to isolate patients in a secure facility rather than integrating them with the community. Here I have selected a top ten list based on the number of Flickr photos I found for each asylum in a single search, doubtlessly I will have missed important sites and got the ranking wrong but please feel free to point them out by leaving a comment. All of the photos used below were taken by other photographers and are used under a Creative Commons license (click through to Flickr for attribution), if you think you’ve got a better photo and it’s not CC – get your licensing sorted!
1. Hellingly
2. Cane Hill
3. West Park
4. Whittingham
5. Severalls
6. Denbigh
7. Deva
8. St Mary’s
9. Talgarth
10. St John’s
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Tags: abandoned, asylum, cane hill, dark, decay, denbigh, derelict, deva, health, hellingly, hospital, lunatic, mental, nhs, ruin, severalls, st johns, st marys, talgarth, urban exploration, urbex, west park, whittingham
[...] up on my Top 10 Abandoned Asylums post I decided to start looking at other ‘genres’ of urban exploration, in this [...]
Yeh, fair play but the better condition asylums like High Royds, Stone House and Lancaster Moor deserve some reperesentation!
I quite like you site, i was after doing some Top 10s on mine if i ever get it how i want it!
Great post and fantastic images here! Your article was the inspiration behind a post I just did on asylums, borrowing a few of the ones listed here. I guess some of these had become proper hospitals by the times they closed but even so, it’s amazing to think there are still so many of these places around! Would be great if they redeveloped the buildings… although I’m not actually sure I’d want to live in one!