This wonderful villa is Lawn House, in Hanwell, on the western edge of London. It was in use as a small private asylum in the mid- to late-19th century, with a maximum of six wealthy female patients in residence at any one time.

Originally run by Dr John Conolly (who was also superintendent of the huge Middlesex County Asylum close by), Lawn House subsequently came under the management of Conolly’s son-in-law, psychiatrist-to-the-wealthy Henry Maudsley.

Lawn House was (very sadly, in my view) pulled down in 1902, and today, only a forlorn hard-standing and patch of wilderness marks the spot (see my pic below, top pic).

However, the wider area is now known as Conolly Dell, to commemorate the doctor. It’s a lovely park, though it’s also true to say the lake could do with a dredge and clean-up, and the monument to Dr Conolly has seen better days.

Paul Lang has kindly supplied the two sepia vintage photos of Conolly Dell; plus the contemporary photo (bottom) from a series he has shot of the Dell and Hanwell.

Back in the 1870s Mrs Louisa Lowe was a patient at Lawn House, and in chapter 9 of Inconvenient People, I detail her hilarious complaints about its many deficiencies. So bad was the smell from the small lake, Lowe nicknamed the asylum Pond Hall, and claimed that the stench and the damp rendered the bedrooms at the front of the villa unusable. She said that the privies in the asylum (“windowless and pestilential”) emptied straight into the pond, rendering the smells even more disgusting. And for this, Maudsley was charging the huge sum of £420 a year per lady. Lawn House, wrote Lowe, was “a whited sepulchre: bright, fair and surrounded by flowers – and foul within”.

Paul Lang is co-author (with Dr Jonathan Oates) of Ealing Through Time (Amberley Publishing, £14.99). The Lawn House vintage picture is part of the wonderful collection at Ealing Local Studies Library www.ealing.gov.uk/info/201244/local_history_centre