Leavesden Mental Hospital was a mental health facility at Leavesden on the outskirts of

Abbots Langley Abbots Langley is a large village and civil parish in the English county of Hertfordshire. It is an old settlement and is mentioned (under the name of Langelai) in the Domesday Book. Economically the village is closely linked to Watford and was f ...

Hertfordshire Hertfordshire ( or ; often abbreviated Herts) is one of the home counties in southern England. It borders Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire to the north, Essex to the east, Greater London to the south, and Buckinghamshire to the west. For govern ...

History

The facility was commissioned by the

Metropolitan Asylums Board The Metropolitan Asylums Board (MAB) was established under Poor Law legislation to deal with London's sick and poor. It was established by the Metropolitan Poor Act 1867 and dissolved in 1930, when its functions were transferred to the London Count ...

and designed by John Giles. It opened as the Metropolitan Asylum for Chronic Imbeciles in 1870. At the same time the St Pancras Union Workhouse established an Industrial School across the road. Both institutions were initially under the chairmanship of

William Henry Wyatt Sir William Henry Wyatt (1823-1898) was Magistrate and Deputy Lieutenant for Middlesex, and social reformer in his role of Chairman of both the Middlesex County Lunatic Asylum at Colney Hatch and the Metropolitan Asylum for Chronic Imbeciles at ...

. In the 1880s two cemeteries were built on East Lane for patients who had died in the hospital; one remains accessible, but the other has been left to become wooded. A nurses' home was added to the asylum in 1904. The

Jack the Ripper Jack the Ripper was an unidentified serial killer active in and around the impoverished Whitechapel district of London, England, in the autumn of 1888. In both criminal case files and the contemporaneous journalistic accounts, the killer wa ...

suspect

Aaron Kosminski Aaron Kosminski (born Aron Mordke Kozmiński; 11 September 1865 – 24 March 1919) was a Polish barber and hairdresser, and suspect in the Jack the Ripper case. Kosminski was a Polish Jew who emigrated from Congress Poland to England in the 18 ...

was admitted to Leavesden Asylum on 19 April 1894. Case notes indicate that Kosminski had been ill since at least 1885. His insanity took the form of auditory hallucinations, a paranoid fear of being fed by other people that drove him to pick up and eat food dropped as litter, and a refusal to wash or bathe. The asylum was renamed the Leavesden Mental Hospital in 1920.

London County Council London County Council (LCC) was the principal local government body for the County of London throughout its existence from 1889 to 1965, and the first London-wide general municipal authority to be directly elected. It covered the area today kno ...

took administrative control of the facility in 1930 and the former St Pancras Industrial School was taken over as an annexe for chronic cases in 1931. It became Leavesden Hospital in 1937. After the introduction of

Care in the Community Care in the Community (also called "Community Care" or "Domiciliary Care") is a British policy of deinstitutionalisation, treating and caring for physically and mentally disabled people in their homes rather than in an institution. Institutional ca ...

in the 1980s the hospital reduced in size and closed in 1997. The hospital has since been converted into a private housing estate, Leavesden Court. The development consists mainly of residential apartments, with the charity "Demand" (Design and manufacture for Disability) operating from the building previously used as the on-site chapel.

References

Sources

External links

London Metropolitan Archives, Leavesden Hospital
{{authority control Defunct hospitals in Hertfordshire Former psychiatric hospitals in England Cemeteries in Hertfordshire Hospitals disestablished in 1997