I Explored Abandoned Asylums To Capture What The Patients Would Have Seen Through Their Windows (30 Pics)

The grand entrances, endless corridors, imposing towers and lavish ballrooms tend to dominate the imagery that we see from asylums after their closure, and understandably so. But while I have admitted my role as something of an inevitable tourist, a passing voyeur in what was, for better or worse (and while it’s completely untrue to say these places were always negative for all of those who lived in them, it’s safe to say it was more often for the worse), not a happy place to be for most, I have always had a respect for those who called these places home, willingly or otherwise, and thought of my reason to be there more as documentation than exploitation.

These photos span from 2008 to 2019, and the variation in quality reflects that personal journey for me too; many are shots I wouldn’t normally publish as in many cases they were taken without any particular future use in mind (or represent a time when still learning my craft) and being as I say, perhaps less photogenic or striking than many of the other images we expect to see from such locations.

My journey as a photographer started around 2005. I just began playing around with a 35mm film camera and grew to love the feel of an SLR camera. By 2008 I was doing occasional paid photography work, but very small scale. I was asked to take some photos to illustrate a book, and one of these involved obtaining a picture of an asylum in Lincolnshire, England. It had been abandoned for nearly twenty years at that time, and just looked so alluring, mysterious, and compelling from the outside alone that I had to come back and find out what was inside, which I did, a couple of months later.

My knowledge of these historic institutions at that time was much the same as most, I suppose; it came from films and TV and meant they were places of incarceration and misery, places to be feared in their day and just as much, perhaps even more so, in their gloomy, derelict abandonment. Even the word “asylum”, so caring and maternal when first introduced as an alternative to the pejorative “madhouse” of the 18th and early 19th Centuries, had come to symbolize fear, persecution, horror and the grim concept of long-term, possibly permanent detainment against a human will.

As I explored these places on foot, finding out which were still in use, which were long gone, and which were empty, I learned more about the practicalities and layout of the places from the inside, while soaking up knowledge about their remarkable histories and the ideas which led to their creation when back on the outside.

While even the smallest public asylums in Britain were the size of a generous town hall or other big civic building, the largest spanned over a third of a mile end-to-end (around three times the length of Battersea Power Station or wider than the Empire State Building is tall), composed in some cases of more than 27,000,000 bricks and home to well over 3,500 patients and hundreds of staff. These self-contained buildings were designed to provide everything that could possibly be needed (physically, at least) within a single location which could take half a day or more to walk around, without even leaving the same set of buildings, interconnected as they were with walkways, tunnels, and seemingly endless corridors. Some of the later, more spread-out designs were three-quarters of a mile between the furthest wards, leaving staff often resorting to bicycles just to make their daily rounds.

The asylum that left the biggest impression on me was the first I visited, which was St John's at Bracebridge Heath in Lincolnshire (it had been the Lincolnshire County Lunatic Asylum and opened in 1852). It wasn't the biggest, or really the most interesting, perhaps - being mostly cleared and stripped of equipment, etc. - but that's what started me on a mission to photograph as many asylums as possible, and I've shot over eighty of them now, with the most recent being earlier in 2022. Nothing will quite compare to the feeling of venturing inside for the first time.

I think that a lot of us have an innate fascination with ruins: they tell us about who we are, and who we once were. What we collectively or individually aspired to at some earlier stage, and the transient and temporary nature of even the most solid and seemingly permanent things we create.

Obviously, it helps that ruins can often be so photogenic, but much of that attraction comes from their ability to stoke the imagination and inspire a sense of reflection and wonder. They are also often - perhaps surprisingly - very nice places to be, as far away from the noise and bustle of the outside world, often with just the sounds of nature and the creaks of the building itself for company, a place to reflect and wonder.

You also never quite know what you're going to find, even if others have visited the site before, so there's a real sense of uncurated exploration and child-like excitement that is very difficult to replicate in many other areas of life, where so many experiences are tidied up, sanitized, and packaged for us.

I hope you enjoy seeing the pictures as much as I enjoyed taking them, and that getting to see as close as can now be offered to what the people who called these places home would have seen can give you just a little insight into the lives of those hundreds of thousands who almost never got a chance to make their own thoughts and feelings known, being buried so deeply in these initially well-meaning, but ultimately all-consuming institutions.