Accounting for the abandoned Winwick Hospital branch

Here's a large chunk of one of the Sighcology columns I write for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy.

Why did these hospitals have those gigantic water-towers and chimneys? Dr Claire Hilton, the historian in residence at the Royal College of Psychiatrists, once discussed the question on the college’s website.

One reason was the institutions’ remoteness, whether this was dictated by a Victorian faith in the restorative powers of country air or a more 20th-century desire to hide the unfit away. It meant they often lacked mains water – many villages were not connected until after the second world war – so pumping water up to a storage tank at the top of a tower was the only way to ensure a sufficient and reliable supply. And the size of the asylums, which might have over 2,000 residents, dictated that those tanks would be huge.

Hilton quotes an 1894 book on the management of asylums as recommending the water tower be at least 20 feet higher than the highest part of the rest of the building and the tank capacious enough to hold at least 48 hours' supply. And in those days, the pumping this entailed meant the hospital needed a powerful steam engine – hence the chimneys.

The water supply had another use: fighting the fires to which their conditions made these buildings vulnerable. Many asylums, says Hilton, formed their own fire brigades of staff and patients.

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If you had an engine in steam every day, then you got through a lot of coal. And that coal had to be brought to the hospital, often over inadequate rural roads. The solution many hospital boards and councils came up with was a railway: sometimes a whole complex of lines.

In 1896 the London County Council purchased the Horton Estate in Surrey with the intention of building a cluster of mental hospitals and other institutions there. A railway system, linked with the main line, was built to carry materials for the construction of the hospitals and then carry the coal and other goods they required for day-to-day operation. The cluster, naturally, had its own power station.

In the 1920s the volume of coal and coke delivered to the power station, and to glasshouses at one of the hospitals, reached a peak of 15,000 tonnes per year.

This railway system was little used during the second world war, when some of the hospitals were given over to wounded and recuperating soldiers, and it was scrapped not long after hostilities ceased. But before it closed, enthusiasts in sports jackets and flannels came to photograph the operations for railway magazines. It is said you can still find traces of the lines among the housing estates, private roads and golf courses that now occupy the Horton Estate.

All this explains why a mental hospital needed its own branch line off the West Coast Main Line. The video above shows RWH Trains exploring what remains of it today,

Winwick Hospital opened in 1902, which neatly illustrates a point made in the Sighcology I have just sent off: the practices we condemn as "Victorian" often belong in reality to the 20th century.