Clock View ‘captures public’s imagination’

It was a shock to see the BBC national breakfast news lead, on 16 February this year, on a story of the opening of a new NHS mental healthcare facility. Enthusiastic commentary described the step-change in quality that patients can expect over sweeping images of hotel-like interiors and landscaped gardens. The NHS has not had positive exposure like this for a generation. We had forgotten how well designed hospitals capture the public’s imagination. This article describes the background to, design, and delivery of, this landmark project.

At the foundation of the NHS, the vast majority of beds in the service were for people with mental illness. The closure of psychiatric hospitals was signalled in 1961 by health minister, Enoch Powell, who famously evoked the brooding ‘water towers and chimneys’ of the old asylums. In their day, the great Victorian asylums provided a refuge for lost souls and, sometimes, innovative therapies. However advances in medical treatment, societal change, and a more humane understanding of illness, meant many of the older mental hospitals became unloved and sinister institutions.

In the half century since Enoch Powell’s speech, the closure of the asylums, and the policy of ‘care in the community’, have, slowly and hesitantly, prevailed over the old institutions. Although it has been disparaged for its penny-pinching austerity and drive to push the burden of care for vulnerable adults onto families, community-based care is liberation for many, and reflects a historic advance in the treatment of people with mental illness in our society.