Visited with Ella.
After our trip to Dover we headed here, a little out of the way, before heading home. I had been told it was open and knew we had to be quick before it was sealed again.
After crawling through mud we got into Martlet and weren’t disappointed. I’d been here previously but it was all sealed and the outside access was blocked. It’s really wrecked in there but the floors are relatively ok other than in the kitchen.
With Martlet House there were still patient records in there detailing patients who had gone AWOL and their diagnosis, medical forms and equipment. This was once the Isolation Ward and was later used to house psychiatric patients
We decided we would go home after we had been in here coz it was late and there was a light flashing on and off by Linden House that had put us off going there. When we came out of Martlet it had started raining so the mud crawl was much more fun. We walked past Linden to get back to the car and the light was still flashing. We then decided to investigate and it turned out to be a light on the nursery so went further and it was open so we thought we may as well go in after all.
Linden is very samey inside so it didn’t take us as long in there, still managed to take a shit tonne of photos. I did query wether this was definitely the accommodation given the mesh on the stairwell between the ground and first floor. This is something you would usually see in a ward building.
I had the following conversation with someone who told me : “I have spoken to someone who lived in there, room 216 top floor. She worked there 1989-1991. She confirmed the mesh on the stairwell was like that when they lived there”
So I wonder why the mesh was there, was it once used as wards before it’s last use or was it designed to be used as wards and someone changed their mind after the mesh was put up? There was certainly something off about the first floor, I felt uncomfortable being on that floor.
History- (short version as we all know it)
St Francis Hospital was a mental health facility in Hayward’s Heath in. The main building survives and is a Grade II listed building.
The hospital, which was designed by Henry Edward Kendall Jr in the Italianate style using a corridor plan layout, opened as the Sussex County Asylum in July 1859. An extra storey was added to the ward blocks in 1864. It became the Brighton County Borough Asylum in 1903 and the Brighton County Borough Mental Hospital in 1919 before joining the NHS as St Francis Hospital in 1948.
After the introduction of care in the community of in the early 1980s, the hospital went into a period of decline and part of the site was made available to facilitate the construction of the Princess Royal Hospital in the late 1980s. St Francis Hospital briefly became the west wing of the Princess Royal Hospital in 1992 but closed completely in November 1995. The site was subsequently developed for residential use as Southdowns Park.
After our trip to Dover we headed here, a little out of the way, before heading home. I had been told it was open and knew we had to be quick before it was sealed again.
After crawling through mud we got into Martlet and weren’t disappointed. I’d been here previously but it was all sealed and the outside access was blocked. It’s really wrecked in there but the floors are relatively ok other than in the kitchen.
With Martlet House there were still patient records in there detailing patients who had gone AWOL and their diagnosis, medical forms and equipment. This was once the Isolation Ward and was later used to house psychiatric patients
We decided we would go home after we had been in here coz it was late and there was a light flashing on and off by Linden House that had put us off going there. When we came out of Martlet it had started raining so the mud crawl was much more fun. We walked past Linden to get back to the car and the light was still flashing. We then decided to investigate and it turned out to be a light on the nursery so went further and it was open so we thought we may as well go in after all.
Linden is very samey inside so it didn’t take us as long in there, still managed to take a shit tonne of photos. I did query wether this was definitely the accommodation given the mesh on the stairwell between the ground and first floor. This is something you would usually see in a ward building.
I had the following conversation with someone who told me : “I have spoken to someone who lived in there, room 216 top floor. She worked there 1989-1991. She confirmed the mesh on the stairwell was like that when they lived there”
So I wonder why the mesh was there, was it once used as wards before it’s last use or was it designed to be used as wards and someone changed their mind after the mesh was put up? There was certainly something off about the first floor, I felt uncomfortable being on that floor.
History- (short version as we all know it)
St Francis Hospital was a mental health facility in Hayward’s Heath in. The main building survives and is a Grade II listed building.
The hospital, which was designed by Henry Edward Kendall Jr in the Italianate style using a corridor plan layout, opened as the Sussex County Asylum in July 1859. An extra storey was added to the ward blocks in 1864. It became the Brighton County Borough Asylum in 1903 and the Brighton County Borough Mental Hospital in 1919 before joining the NHS as St Francis Hospital in 1948.
After the introduction of care in the community of in the early 1980s, the hospital went into a period of decline and part of the site was made available to facilitate the construction of the Princess Royal Hospital in the late 1980s. St Francis Hospital briefly became the west wing of the Princess Royal Hospital in 1992 but closed completely in November 1995. The site was subsequently developed for residential use as Southdowns Park.
