Local historian and author Paul Lang contacted me to tell me about a fascinating museum at which he used to volunteer. Paul was the hospital librarian at St Bernard’s Hospital on the Southall-Hanwell border, at the very western edge of London. St Bernard’s is the name by which the former Middlesex County Lunatic Asylum was known from 1937.

Paul was also on the Hospital Museum Committee and explains that “St Bernard’s had a very fine and unique museum, which was opened by the mayor of Ealing in October 1992. One of the more bizarre displays was the reconstruction of a padded cell. The hospital’s Works Department removed it from one of the wards and re-erected it within the museum. I remember one visitor running out shrieking after seeing it, and after that incident, viewing of the cell was limited to staff and to larger visiting parties who had been forewarned of what to expect.”

He continues: “Also potentially distressing was the ‘spinning chair’, or ‘centrifugal treatment unit’, which dated back to the 1820s. The theory was that if you span a patient around in this chair, which was suspended on ropes, the flow of blood in the brain would be redirected and mental disease, or the symptoms at least, would be improved. It must be said, though, that the spinning chair was never in use at Hanwell.

“However, from the 20th century, we did have a device that administered electro-convulsive shocks. Add to that various straightjackets and manacles, and it added up to quite a terrifying collection.

“We also found several things in the tunnels that run under the hospital and which have now been closed for health and safety reasons. I discovered a frightening chamber with metal arm restraints attached to the wall. I think it’s still down there.

“Most of the artefacts weren’t as upsetting and controversial, though. We members of the committee actively sought out items on site before they were lost for good: on an archaeological dig in one part of the Hanwell grounds we unearthed some fine Victorian tiling. We also uncovered a Georgian quill box, as well as a Victorian brass spy-hole and door plate that used to be attached to a ward door.

“Certain items proved to be more problematical, though, when it came to retaining and restoring them. I remember trying to save one of the original Victorian metal windows, which had an ingenious opening mechanism in the form of a circular metal feature at its top. It was very heavy, and it took a colleague and I to shift it to what we took to be a safe place, but alas, it was stolen – the thief must have had a van and a friend to help.

“I also remember a lovely flower urn which had been given to the staff by an American relative of a patient, in thanks for the care taken of their family member – that was stolen too, and is now probably adorning someone’s back garden!

“The museum, sadly, did not survive long following the retirement of its curator, Pauline May, in 2005. Most of the documentary archival material went to the London Metropolitan Archives, the medical artefacts to the Wellcome Trust and the non-medical items to the Gunnersbury Park Museum. The LMA has, among other things, wonderful original building plans, which are in many cases quite different to the blocks as actually completed. Many of the patient records at the LMA can be searched through, though the more recent material is closed access, obviously, for reasons of patient confidentiality.

“Among the things passed to the Gunnersbury Park Museum were a huge lightbulb that was used in the detection of nits; a lump of wattle and daub, which was found in the hospital grounds; and a rock encrusted with trilobites, which was at the bottom of the hospital well – I thought this was one of the most interesting and unusual finds in the collection.

“Today, some of the old wards of St Bernard’s/Hanwell are private housing. A lot of the original buildings remain: the chapel and the hospital brewery (which is now grade II listed) are still highly visible from outside, as is North House, which used to be the superintendent’s house, and the Gate House. There are even some of the old ploughs from the asylum farm, now embedded in the concrete around the edge of the chapel. If you walk around the back of the complex you can see the entrance to the asylum dock from the canal that runs alongside.’

Images, top: Edwardian postcards showing the entrance arch to Hanwell Asylum, with keeper in the foreground, and the driveway leading up to the buildings. 
Below: an 1843 ground plan of the asylum. Bottom: Paul Lang, St Bernard’s librarian.

Paul’s book Ealing Then & Now, In Colour, co-written with Dr Jonathan Oates, is published by The History Press, price £12; his Richmond-upon-Thames Then & Now is also published by The History Press, £14.99.

London Metropolitan Archives, 40 Northampton Rd, London EC1R 0HB, tel: 020 7332 3820 www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/lma

The Gunnersbury Park Museum www.hounslow.info/arts-culture/historic-houses-museums/gunnersbury-park-museum