There’s an unveiling of a green heritage plaque and a book launch going on in Tooting this afternoon, to commemorate “the thousands of lives lived” at the site of the old Tooting Bec Asylum.
There’s hardly a trace of the old mental hospital today, where people were treated – many virtually incarcerated – between 1903 and its closure in 1995.
The site today is known as the Heritage Park Estate, comprising dozens of modern houses and flats. Residents of the estate have been researching the asylum’s history.
Wandsworth Council has agreed to erect a Green Plaque at the estate to remember the hospital, its residents and staff.
The Green Plaque will be unveiled at 2pm. Part of the original wall to the asylum is still there, by the pedestrian entrance to the Heritage Park Estate at the corner of Tooting Bec Road and Franciscan Road.
And Tooting History Group is publishing a book to record the history of the hospital to coincide with the unveiling: Tooting Bec Asylum Remembered 1903-1995 by Karen Ellis-Rees and Annie Caulfield, who will be at the Pavilion to the rear of the Tooting Lido car park from 3pm. Copies of the book are available for £5.
In 1983, Inside Croydon’s Editor, Steven Downes, interviewed Tom Richards, the winner of the 1948 Olympic marathon silver medal. Richards had worked for many years as an orderly or porter at Tooting Bec Asylum, including when he was a leading international road racer in the 1930s through to the early ’50s. In 1985, Downes’s grandfather, William John Downes, aged 86, died while in care at Tooting Bec Hospital.
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Are there similar books/plaques going up at any others of the numerous asylums in the area/on the edges of London (eg. Warlingham Park, Caterham, Netherne, Cane Hill, Queen Mary’s Hospital for Children in Carshalton (built by the Metropolitan Asylums Board but never operated as an asylum), Banstead (where the two prisons are now), Belmont, the five in the Epsom Cluster (St. Ebba’s, Manor, Horton, Long Grove and West Park), not to mention the Heath Asylum in Bexley ?
Hoped someone might mention a similar history project on Cane Hill. After all, there’s no shortage of sleb connections to its former patients, with Charlie Chaplin’s mother and relatives of Michael Caine and David Bowie having been there.
There is a book already about Cane Hill:
Cane Hill Hospital: The Tower on the Hill First Edition by Buttrey, Pam (ISBN: 9780954958237)
With Michael Caine and David Bowie, it was their half-brothers. David Bowie’s half-brother, Terry Burns, escaped from Cane Hill and was hit by a train at Coulsdon South station in 1985.
But any commemoration efforts from developers Barratts?
I grew up in Streatham and walked past the hospital regularly. In my time it was an open hospital with the patients walking in and out. It had magnificent grounds including tennis courts (probably for staff) visible from Tooting Bec Road. There was also Springfield Hospital which was next to my secondary school, Ernest Bevin. It is now also a housing development though I do believe that the main building has been preserved.
Guessing, because I don’t know your age exactly, but you may have been witnessing some of the first phase of that Thatcherite initiative, and deep euphemism, “Care in the Community”.
Certainly, in the hospital’s earlier years, few of the patients at Tooting Bec were allowed out.
The period that I am referring to is the 70s and 80s. The gates were always open, as were the gates at Springfield when I was at Ernest Bevin.