ABSTRACT
Those of us who trained in the UK as mental health nurses in the 1980s or before will have spent the majority of our student years studying and working in aVictorian-era mental hospital. Before the development of community-focused care, these massive asylums, often built out in the countryside away from mainstream society, housed thousands of ‘mental patients’ in scores of impersonal wards at the ends of miles of polished corridors. Those living in these managed communities wandered between the dance hall and the church, from arts and crafts to industrial therapy, through the acres of cricket pitches and bowling greens to the hospital farm.
