For a century and a half, people with a mental illness or a learning disability in Britain were most likely to be cared for in a county asylum: a vast building in its own grounds, a few miles out of town. Almost all of them have now closed. This is a map of 233 of them, from English Wikipedia: where they were built, when, how big they grew, and what the sites are now.
In 1808 Parliament allowed the counties of England and Wales to build asylums for "pauper lunatics", people who until then had often been kept in workhouses, prisons or private madhouses. Few did at first. In 1845 a second pair of Acts made it a duty, and the building began in earnest: big, solid, self-contained institutions with their own farms, chapels, laundries, water towers and cemeteries, set in open country. By the middle of the twentieth century they held tens of thousands of people, many for most of their lives.
Then, from the 1960s, policy turned against them. In 1961 the Minister of Health, Enoch Powell, told a mental health conference that the old asylums would have to go, and over the next forty years they did: closed, emptied, and sold. Many became upmarket flats, their names changed again. Press play on the map below to watch them open and close.
This page uses the names the institutions had at the time, such as "lunatic asylum", because they are part of the record. They are not how we would describe anyone today. The people who lived in these places were patients and residents, many of them poor, many admitted for conditions that would now be treated at home or not treated as illness at all.
Circles: each asylum or psychiatric hospital with coordinates in its Wikipedia article. Colour: what the site is now, as the article states it. Area: the largest number of beds or patients the article states, where it states one; small dots have none. In "Open in the chosen year", filled circles were open that year and faint rings had already closed. Source: English Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0), revisions of 2026. Coastline: Natural Earth. Counties: ONS and OSNI (Open Government Licence). Relief and grey map tiles: Esri.
The history below is from the Wikipedia articles on the Acts and on the asylums themselves, which I quote and credit; the counts that follow are from my data.
Of the 244 places in my data, 230 have an opening year in their article. A handful are much older than the county system: Bethlem in London, founded in 1247 and the origin of the word "bedlam", and 9 in all that opened before 1800, mostly charitable hospitals and private houses. Between 1808 and 1844, under the permissive first Act, 31 opened. Then the pace picked up. 91 opened between 1845 and 1889, with the busiest decade the 1860s (30). After a lull in the 1880s (10) came a second wave around the turn of the century, as the cities ran out of room: 19 in the 1890s and 26 in the 1900s, many of them huge. In all, 62% of the places with an opening year opened between 1845 and 1914.
Openings and closures by decade
Asylums and psychiatric hospitals by the decade in which their Wikipedia article says they opened (up) and closed (down). 9 that opened before 1800 are not shown. Hover or tap a bar.
The number open at once tells the same story as a single line. 43 of the places in my data were open in 1845, 145 in 1900 and 175 by 1914. The count kept creeping up for another half century, as new hospitals opened and almost none closed, and peaked at 199 between 1972 and 1983.
The rise and fall: how many were open each year
Places open in each year, of the 222 with an opening year and either a closing year or no closure recorded. Drag the map's year slider and the marker follows. Hover the line.
"There they stand, isolated, majestic, imperious, brooded over by the gigantic water-tower and chimney combined, rising unmistakable and daunting out of the countryside, the asylums which our forefathers built with such immense solidity to express the notions of their day."Enoch Powell, the Water Tower speech, 1961, as quoted in Wikipedia's article on Powell
Powell was right that they would resist. In 1961, 198 of the places in my data were open, and in 1980 there were still 198: in the twenty years after the speech almost nothing closed. Of the 155 closures with a year, only 5 came before 1961 and 2 between 1961 and 1979. Then the dam broke: 17 closed in the 1980s, 83 in the 1990s and 31 in the 2000s. 64% of all the closures happened between 1980 and 1999, the years of Care in the Community; the median closing year is 1996. By 2000 the number open had fallen to 102, and today 69 of these places are open, many of them as small modern units on part of an old site.
For the Victorian asylums the gap between opening and closing was long. Of the 131 that opened between 1808 and 1914 and have both years, the median lasted 126 years, and 102 (78%) lasted a century or more. Peak building, in the 1900s, and peak closing, in the 1990s, are 90 years apart.
The articles give a size for 96 of the 244 places, either in the infobox or in the text, usually as beds or patients at some date. These are not consistent peaks, but they show the scale. 30 places held a thousand or more at some point and 10 two thousand or more. The largest is Whittingham, near Preston in Lancashire, which by 1939 held 3,533 patients, "the largest mental hospital in Great Britain" according to its article. Prestwich, near Manchester, held 3,135 by 1903. The median stated size of an asylum opened between 1808 and 1914 is 500; for units opened since 1990 it is 122.
The biggest, by the largest size their article states
Beds or patients, from the infobox or the largest figure the text gives (for example "accommodation for 1,700 patients"). Click a bar to find it on the map.
London built its asylums in the countryside around it. Only 7 of the places in my data that opened between 1830 and 1939 lie within 10 km of Charing Cross, against 28 between 10 and 40 km out, a ring through Surrey, Hertfordshire, Kent, Essex and the outer edge of today's Greater London. The ring's stated sizes alone add up to 21,542 beds or patients, for the 16 that give one. 24 of the 28 have closed, and 16 are now homes.
The densest knot is on the Horton estate west of Epsom in Surrey, where the London County Council built "five large psychiatric hospitals", in the words of Wikipedia's article on the Epsom Cluster; the original plan was for six, housing up to 12,000 patients. In my data the five opened between 1899 and 1921, all within 2.1 km of each other and about 21 km from central London, and four of them state sizes adding up to 5,937. All but St Ebba's had closed by 2003.
I read what each site is now from the words its article uses, first in the lead and, if that says nothing, in the rest of the article's opening text: "converted into apartments", "redeveloped for residential use", "demolished", "derelict" and so on (the rules are in the methods below). Of the 173 places that are no longer open, 81 (47%) are now homes, in converted buildings or new housing on the old grounds; 17 have another new use, such as a university campus, offices or, at Banstead and Parc, a prison; 22 are recorded as demolished with no new use stated; and 2 as derelict or in ruins. For 51 (30%) the opening text of the article does not say. Of the closed sites whose fate is stated, 66% are homes.
What the sites are now
All 244 places, by what their Wikipedia article says the site is now. Click a bar to show only those on the map.
The flats often keep the buildings and lose the name. Developers have turned the old wards into estates called Princess Park Manor (Colney Hatch, later Friern Hospital), Virginia Park (Holloway Sanatorium) and Wadsley Park Village (Middlewood). 25 of the 81 housing sites also mention demolition, usually of the later wards around a retained main block. Many survivors are protected: 83 of the 244 articles (34%) say the buildings or part of them are listed, including 63 of the asylums opened between 1808 and 1914 (36%). Three are Grade I: Bootham Park in York, Holloway Sanatorium near Virginia Water in Surrey, and Grove Place in Hampshire.
Asylums changed their names more than once, and the old names survive mostly in the articles. 141 of the 244 articles (58%) record a name with "asylum" in it, 59 with "lunatic asylum" or similar, and 82 a "mental hospital" name; 73 record both. Only 5 articles are still titled "asylum". Where an article gives a single year for a "mental hospital" name (33 places), 21 fall between 1920 and 1939, around the Mental Treatment Act of 1930, which made "mental hospital" the official term. After the NHS took over in 1948 many took a saint's name or a place name instead: 35 of today's titles begin with "St". Exminster in Devon is typical: Devon County Lunatic Asylum, then Devon Mental Hospital, then Exe Vale Hospital.
Which names the articles record
Places whose article records at least one name of each kind, from the title, the infobox's former names and the text. A place can have several. Hover a bar.
Powell's "isolated" was accurate. The asylums were built where land was cheap and the air thought healthy, with room for a farm. I measured the distance from each place to the nearest town or city that has at least 100,000 people today (41 places in Natural Earth). For the asylums opened between 1845 and 1914 the median distance is 20.4 km, and 88% are more than 5 km from such a town. For places opened since 1948, mostly smaller units, the share more than 5 km away is 71%. Present-day populations are a blunt measure for Victorian siting, so treat these as rough.
Distance to the nearest big town, by when they opened
Share of places more than 5 km and more than 15 km from the nearest town of 100,000 or more today. Hover a bar.
All 244 places, with the years, size and fate their article states. Click a row to see it on the map; 11 have no coordinates.
Data. I started from 659 English Wikipedia articles found by walking 22 categories under Psychiatric hospitals in the United Kingdom, Former psychiatric hospitals in the United Kingdom and Defunct hospitals in England, Scotland and Wales, three levels deep, with the first 6,000 characters of each article's wikitext (its infobox and opening text) and the revision of 2026 I used. I kept an article if it describes a single place and calls it a psychiatric or mental hospital, an asylum, or an institution for people with learning disabilities in the first two sentences of its lead (225 articles), or in its infobox type or speciality, or files it in a psychiatric hospital category and uses one of those words in its text. That kept 244 and dropped 415: 355 general and other hospitals, 45 articles about country houses, workhouses, streets and other things that are not hospitals, 14 about people, NHS trusts, tribunals, units within another hospital or the Epsom Cluster as a group, and 1 duplicate of the same site. The dropped list, with reasons, is in the data.
Fields. Coordinates come from the coord template in the wikitext (231) or the Wikipedia API (2). Opening and closing years come from the infobox, or failing that from phrases such as "opened in 1851" in the lead or from Wikipedia's establishment categories; a place counts as still open when its article describes it in the present tense and gives no closing year. Size is the infobox beds figure or the largest number of beds or patients the text states with words such as "accommodation for" or "had". What a site is now comes from keyword rules on the lead, and on the rest of the opening text if the lead says nothing; a site with housing counts as homes even if most buildings were demolished. Listed status comes from phrases such as "Grade II listed" and from listed building categories.
What this is not. It is not a complete list of Britain's asylums: Wikipedia has articles on only some of them, the categories miss others, and Northern Ireland and Wales are thinly covered (5 and 14 places). It also includes some modern mental health units, a few private houses and 14 institutions for people with learning disabilities, which were part of the same system. The years, sizes and fates are what the articles say, read by rules, and the articles are uneven: some report the first patients, some the foundation stone, some the closure of the last ward. Only the first 6,000 characters of each article were available, so the later history is often missing, and 51 closed sites have no stated fate. The Wikidata extract I was given turned out to use the class for clinics rather than psychiatric hospitals: none of its 213 items matched an article here (most were community health centres and dental practices), so I did not use it.