Three Explores in One
Following on from last weekend’s thoroughly enjoyable explore of Birkwood Hospital a follow up trip to Glasgow was hastily arranged and three more former institutions were visited. The three in question share a degree of commonality - not least because of their ruinous condition – so I’m including them all in the one thread by way of an update.
As with all such hospitals their decline became terminal with the passing of the 1990 Community Care Act, and what has become of the grand buildings owes as much to criminal asset mismanagement as it does to arsonists and vandals.
Hartwood Hospital
The site is patrolled but we didn’t have any bother, although the buildings have recently been secured with metal plates over the widow apertures. Even after finding a way in to the main building access to the tower wasn’t straightforward, but we figured it out and headed up…
Taking a look above us we saw the rotting timbers of ceilings and floors hanging on by a thread…
Lennox Castle Hospital
The former Lennox Castle Certified Institution for Mental Defectives as it was catchily known shares a similar back story to Birkwood Hospital, it too having been a mansion purchased for conversion in the wake of the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act. Originally the seat of the Clan Kincaid, the present incarnation of Lennox Castle was built in 1812, but in 1927 the estate was purchased and plans drawn up for a state-of-the-art 1,200 bed hospital. The castle itself was ultimately used as the nurses’ home until it was vacated in 1987, though the grounds were still used to accommodate patients until 2002.
Throughout the 90s local argument raged and the castle fell quickly into disrepair. The health board were asked to make repairs but sold the site for development, with planners subsequently refusing them permission to convert the castle into flats and citing the greenbelt as their reasoning. More debate took place in the decade that ensued with the council expressing concern and the developer doing little except issue revised conversion plans. The roof was stripped, the windows smashed, the floors collapsed and the interior features were largely lost forever by the time a major fire ravaged the building and reduced it to little more than a ruinous shell in May 2008. Since then two of the four towers have collapsed or been partially demolished.
From the grand entrance you can see that much effort was put into the detail of the building…
…with a ribbed stone ceiling outside the front door…
…and plaques like this one above it.
On the inside however you’ll find little more than a ruin. Two of the towers remain climbable if you trust the stairs, but the walls are crumbling around them.
Inside the grand entrance is all that’s left of the once grand interior:
The rest is a mess, the twisted remains of the fire escape hanging over it…
There are still some nice features to be found though, like these dudes:
Greenbelt or no greenbelt, permission for 76 houses, associated landscaping and enabling works was finally granted to the developers in 2012. One wonders if that had been granted 20 years earlier whether the castle might actually have been saved.
It's currently looking unlikely.
Gartloch Hospital
On the way back to Glasgow the sky suggested torrential rain, but it also revealed Gartloch Administration Block’s inimitable gothic twin towers - protruding through the trees and dominating the land for miles around. It would have been rude not to take a quick look. Standing defiant and foreboding, the building is now nothing more than a stripped out shell in the centre of a luxury village made from the buildings that have so far been renovated.
There seem to be no plans to move on this or the adjacent blocks anytime soon, and in a staggering act of what can only be described as licensed vandalism the developer has been granted planning permission for the demolition of the recreation block on the grounds that its conversion is now unfeasible. It’s still there to date, and since we’d run out of time and the rain was about to hit, we left this one for another time.
Providing it’s still there…
Thanks for stopping by
