The Herald - The Herald Magazine
PERSONAL TOUCH
SUSAN SWARBRICK RETURNS TO THE FORMER PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL WHERE HER FATHER WAS A NURSE – AS A DEVELOPER IS POISED TO TAKE OVER THIS HISTORICAL ARCHITECTURAL GEM
Susan Swarbrick relives her childhood memories of Bangour Village Hospital in West Lothian
THE windows and doors are boarded up, paint peeling like flaking skin and sections of the brickwork crumbling to dust. Nearby the jagged remnants of a fence resemble a row of rotting teeth. A warning has been spray-painted on many of the walls: “Danger, keep out!”
But if I close my eyes I can see it as it once was. The pristine exteriors and manicured gardens. I can smell the freshly cut grass out on the cricket field and hear the sound of a radio gently drifting from one of the wards.
In its heyday Bangour Village Hospital in West Lothian was a busy psychiatric facility. Today, though, the only noise is the distant hum of the M8, an occasional chirrup of birdsong and the wind rustling the tree branches.
A gamut of memories swirls in my head as I walk through the grounds this winter afternoon. The paths are mossy and overgrown. Nature is reclaiming this place. The concrete underfoot is cracked with weeds sprouting, the signs and road markings faded.
Even so, I know my way around like the
back of my hand. Over there is the shop and the recreation hall. Down that way is the boilerhouse and cricket field. Follow the road up through the trees and you’ll find the bowling green.
The last of the patients left here in 2004. In the years since it has lain empty as NHS Lothian sought to find a buyer for the sprawling 215-acre site with its reported £8 million price tag.
That search may be at an end. In recent days it has been confirmed that a developer is in advanced talks to purchase the site, with a sale expected to be confirmed by this weekend. But what next? Already there have been rumours swirling that the complex could be flattened to make way for houses.
On paper it sounds straightforward, but the reality is far less clear cut. There are 15 listed buildings at Bangour Village Hospital, with the church and recreation hall Category A structures. For many who know Bangour, to see it demolished would feel akin to architectural vandalism.
My own ties to the hospital site run far deeper than simply bricks and mortar. I grew up less than half a mile away in the village of Dechmont. The Bangour story is one that is in my blood.
All these wards – villas as they were known – have numbers. Most have ghost stories. This big building I’m standing in front of? That’s the nursing home. And it’s where our story begins.
IT was 1963 when my late father Alexander Swarbrick arrived to begin his training. He was 22. For the seven years previously, he had worked in a coal mine. As pit first aider, he proved himself blessed with a cool head and strong stomach when faced with even the grisliest of injuries.
But it was healing broken minds rather than broken bones in which my father found his calling. He would spend much of the next two decades working at Bangour Village Hospital. It is him I think of as I wander among the neglected and abandoned buildings.
Later in the day I visit John Galvin, a retired nurse who did his psychiatry training at Bangour in the intake a few years after my father. They knew each other well. Galvin, 69, from Dechmont, has happy memories of his time working at the hospital.
“I started off in Ward 4, which was known as psychogeriatric in those days,” he says. “Then, because I was young and fit, they decided to send me up to the locked ward. I spent most of my training in Ward 25, which had the more at-risk patients with restricted access to the outside community.”
Galvin developed a strong rapport with many of the patients he cared for. This was an era when the use of drugs to treat psychiatric conditions was still in its infancy. As a young nurse Galvin saw everything from psychosis and schizophrenia to post-traumatic stress disorder.
“There was one chap who was a patrician,” he says. “He referred to himself as a lord and would take umbrage if you didn’t address him as that. He once wrote me a cheque for £1 million on a piece of toilet paper.
“Another guy was a fantastic table tennis player. He would always walk about with his collar turned up. We used to play him for a cigarette. No one could beat him. He never had to buy a cigarette.”
The job wasn’t without its challenges, however. “I once got a crack on the head with a urinal [bed pan],” recalls Galvin. “I was helping a man out of bed and he had it hidden under his pillow. As I swung him round to get his slippers on, he hit me over the head. Whack.”
At its conception, Bangour was touted as revolutionary. Edinburgh architect Hippolyte J Blanc won the contract to design it in 1898. Modelled on the Altscherbitz hospital near Leipzig in Germany, the idea was for psychiatric patients to be cared for within their own community setting.
THIS was in marked contrast to the Victorian era when mental illness was poorly understood and so-called “lunatic asylums” were largely dehumanising, prison-like institutions. Bangour was set up on a village system of patient care, encouraging self-sufficiency and with few physical restrictions.
While the blueprint may have been pioneering, general attitudes to mental health still had much catching up to do in the early 20th century when Bangour was built by the Edinburgh District Board of Lunacy/Board of Control to house what was termed “pauper lunatics”.
The location in itself was notable: land was purchased 14 miles west of Edinburgh which was deemed to be sufficiently far enough away from the capital to satisfy any concerns about safety yet still within reach by means of a private railway.
The first patients were admitted in 1904 and Bangour Village Hospital – then called the Edinburgh District Asylum – officially opened to great fanfare two years later. Facilities included a farm, bakery, workshops, recreation hall, school and shop. A library and church followed in subsequent years.
The villa design of the wards drew on a 17th-century Scottish Renaissance style, while the recreation hall is Edwardian Baroque and the church neo-Romanesque.
Two other psychiatric hospitals were built in Scotland on the village system of patient care – Kingseat near Aberdeen and Dykebar Hospital in Paisley opened in 1904 and 1909 respectively – but these have not survived as completely as Bangour.
Much of my childhood was spent in and around Bangour. It never felt like a frightening or creepy place. I knew many of the patients by name. Ditto most of the staff that worked there.
My brother and I were both christened in the church. As I got older and went out on adventures with my friends and our family’s three-legged dog, I would often pop into the nearest ward for a biscuit and glass of diluting juice.
We would go sledging at the cricket field slopes and roll our hard-boiled eggs there at Easter. The best conker trees were next to the boilerhouse and there would be
There was one chap who was a patrician. He referred to himself as a lord and would take umbrage if you didn’t address him as that. He once wrote me a cheque for £1 million on a piece of toilet paper