ABSTRACT
Severalls was built in the heyday of modernism, the start of what Eric Hobsbawm has called 'the short twentieth century'. Now, at its closure, in the midst of postmodernism at the end of the twentieth century, it stands empty. Postmodernism, like modernism, is notoriously difficult to define, but it can be taken as relating broadly to heterogeneity, fragmentation, indeterminacy, and a new concern for difference and 'the other'. Revolutions in technology, communications and pharmacology, as well as a different political and economic climate, have all contributed to what has become a very different means of providing mental health care than at the beginning of the century. Instead of services and resources being consolidated in one space within a unified group of buildings, they are now provided in a more indeterminate and fragmented spatial framework where networks of community psychiatrists, doctors, psychologists and social workers work on a one-to-one basis with patients dispersed over a wide area. l
The Trust coordinates activities between some forty-five different sites using e-mail, bleepers, faxes and telephone answering-machines; it operates from a converted villa2 on a small patch of land of the old Severalls estate. A few acres of the original 300 have been retained. What was once the medical superintendent'S house, and later became doctors' flats, has been converted to a long-stay unit for some half-dozen patients. The material conditions here are comfortable, and each patient has his or her own private room. There is, however, almost nothing for them to do except watch television. There is no work, and now there is little open space left for walks. A resident I spoke to talked of boredom and not having had the choice of co-residents. There is also a secure unit near by, surrounded by fencing, where, again, there is little for patients to do, and where overcrowding and inactivity have become (once again) problems.
