ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the recycling of asylum sites and buildings for residential purposes. It examines context, proceeds from a review of research on the re-use of former psychiatric asylums for residential purposes to a consideration of overarching policy frameworks. In comparison to Grayling well, the residual mental health use at Knowles is thus perhaps more likely to sit uncomfortably alongside residential redevelopment though it too is located on the edge of the site. The asylum landscape was to be retained and the 'centrepiece of the project is landmark Victorian water tower'. It was felt that open spaces should be retained in what was envisaged as a mixed land-use setting. Suppression, which it have termed strategic forgetting, is the most common approach to the re-imagining of former asylum spaces as residential developments. The message was not lost on the owners of other former psychiatric asylum sites In New Zealand.
