| Knowle Hospital | |
| Former main asylum building, now apartments | |
| Geography | |
|---|---|
| Location | Fareham, Hampshire, England, United Kingdom |
| Organisation | |
| Care system | Public NHS |
| Hospital type | Psychiatric |
| Affiliated university | Southampton |
| Services | |
| Emergency department | No Accident & Emergency |
| History | |
| Founded | 1852 |
| Closed | 1996 |
| Links | |
| Lists | Hospitals in England |
The Hampshire County Lunatic Asylum, later Knowle Mental Hospital and Knowle Hospital, was a psychiatric hospital near the town of Fareham in Hampshire, southern England, opened in 1852 and closed in 1996. It was built to the designs of J Harris, architect, under the provisions of the Lunacy Act 1845, and some of the construction of the hospital was undertaken by prisoners of war from the Crimean campaign. The first medical superintendent was Dr Ferguson and the first twenty patients were admitted from the workhouse in Fareham, situated at the junction of the Old Turnpike with Wickham Road. For about a year, in 1857/58, the head gardener at Knowle, Henry Coe, engaged in a personal correspondence with Charles Darwin concerning horticultural matters, especially about the cultivation of kidney beans.
In 1879, the Portsmouth Borough Asylum (St James' Hospital) was opened in Southsea, and Knowle provided care for the rest of Hampshire; later, Park Prewett Hospital in Basingstoke took over responsibilities for the northern half of the county. The staff at Knowle developed working relationships with the Royal Hospital Haslar and Netley Hospital, both important local M.O.D. hospitals. In the later Victorian period, the staff were led by Dr John Manley, medical Superintendent for over thirty years. His assistant was Dr Pater, the brother of Walter Pater, the eminent Victorian man of letters and Oscar Wilde's tutor at Oxford.
In the 1960s, Knowle was the setting for Dr Ronald A. Sandison's psychotherapy practice. Sandison moved to Knowle from Powick Hospital in 1964, and remained at Knowle till 1975. Sandison (1916–2010) was the influential founder of the Wessex Psychotherapy Society and he was one of many British psychiatrists intrigued by the possibilities of psychotherapeutic approaches to schizophrenic illness. In 1965, Knowle became the hub of the Wessex Post-Graduate School of Psychiatry, headed by Drs Ian Skottowe, Angus Galbraith and Stephen Mackeith. With the establishment of the medical school at Southampton University in 1971, the university department of psychiatry originated at Knowle Hospital, and was led by Professor James Gibbons, Richard de Alarcon and Brian Barraclough. Barraclough's research on suicide gave an international reputation to Southampton psychiatry. Following the departure of the Southampton city services to the Royal South Hants Hospital in 1979, Knowle became the provider of mental health services to the linked boroughs of Fareham and Gosport. Also, the Knowle site housed the regional service for child and adolescent psychiatry and the forensic psychiatry services under the leadership of Dr Malcolm Faulk.
When Knowle closed in 1996, local services devolved to Gosport War Memorial Hospital and Hewat House (in Gosport) and to the Meadows in-patient unit and the Osborn Centre in Fareham. Regional forensic services remained on the Knowle site, at Ravenswood House. Nowadays the Knowle site is primarily a residential development, although the NHS establishment (Ravenswood) still offers psychiatric accommodation to a limited number of patients.
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By the mid-19th century the County Asylums Act and Lunacy Act (1845) had made it a requirement that every United Kingdom county should build an asylum if they had not already done so, or should join with another neighbouring county to achieve the same goal. For the Hampshire asylum, a 100-acre (0.40 km2) site was located, known as Knowle Farm, close to Fareham. Purchased towards the end of the 1840s, work began on the asylum - to be known as the Hampshire County Lunatic Asylum - in 1850, and the asylum received its first patients in December 1852.
By 1856, the asylum had expanded to take 400 patients, and growth continued throughout the century - with over 1,000 patients at the asylum by 1900. In the 1950s, Knowle housed almost 2000 patients. Both male and female patients were admitted, and were expected to work on the farm, in the kitchens and in other trades to help support their community. Knowle had a number of features unusual for a county asylum - a splendid church constructed out of the local (Fareham red) bricks (used more famously for the Royal Albert Hall in London), and its own pub, the "County Arms".
Knowle Halt, a small railway station on the Eastleigh to Fareham line, served the asylum from 1907. The station, close to the village of Funtley, was closed in 1964. Trains from the Meon Valley Railway, a cross-country railway in Hampshire, also served Knowle Halt.[1]
The asylum was renamed Knowle Mental Hospital in 1923 and then became Knowle Hospital in 1948, finally closing in 1996. Secure accommodation for patients with mental illness is still provided by Ravenswood House, whose buildings are adjacent to the old hospital.
Over 5,500 former patients of the asylum are buried in Knowle Cemetery. Before 1886 the burial locations were not recorded. Up to four patients could be buried in the same plot, although never on the same day. The last burial at the site took place in 1971. A few remaining iron crosses, used to mark the graves, were removed from the site in 2001 for secure storage, pending a decision to relocate them.
All documents and records of the asylum that still exist are held by the Hampshire Records Office in Winchester. The accession number for the collection is 48M94/ and many records relating to former patients are held, including admissions information, case notes, discharge and death registers, postmortem reports and a burial register. A number of these records are contained in volumes that are still subject to a 100-year closure rule; any work on those volumes, for records outside the closure period, must be undertaken by an archivist at the records office on behalf of the public.
From 2000 onwards, the site was redeveloped by Berkeley Homes as Knowle Village - an exclusive development of apartments (using the former hospital buildings) and new houses over 53 acres (210,000 m2) of the grounds. The principal northern (east-west) building, northern administration building, superintendent's house, chapel and staff cottages were retained and converted to other uses, whilst the central north-south connecting structure and south block were demolished. 130 of the 520 new dwellings were created within existing buildings.[2] As part of this redevelopment there are affordable homes available at Knowle Village, through the government-led shared ownership initiative part-buy, part-rent, with Thames Valley Housing.
The Chapel was refurbished by Berkeley Homes, at a cost exceeding £400,000, who later transferred ownership of the building to Winchester City Council for £1, with an additional gift of £28,000 to provide some funding for future maintenance costs. The building, which is listed, is now leased by the Knowle Communuity Buildings Association (KCBA) for community use.[3]