A few months ago pre-Covid, I went to explore High Royds, an abandoned Victorian mental asylum in Menston, West Yorkshire. I went with my partner and a friend; my friend, an urban exploration enthusiast had been the previous week – on his own, no less! He had found a break in the fence, allowing him to get through to a door that was open, giving access to the building.
Ok, so this is classed as trespassing and is officially illegal. I would not want anybody reading this to think that it’s the sort of thing you can just do on an everyday basis. It can potentially be dangerous but, since this area is now pretty much a building site, it might not be long before it’s something else entirely and the traces of its bleak history will live on only in memory.
The main building with the clock tower is a beautiful example of Victorian, Gothic architecture and along with being one of the last asylums to be closed down, just in 2003, it is also a Grade II listed building.
So, after skirting the High Royds area which is now a housing estate, and getting our bearings, in we went armed with torches, cameras, open minds and as much common sense as we could muster. It was obviously a hazardous area with rubble and would be dark inside so we had to have our wits about us.
It was the back area of the hospital that we explored. We could not get to the main, front entrance as it was all boarded up, although you could make out a certain amount of it by peering through the keyhole in the front doors and you could see a huge room with a big, grand staircase that I would have given anything to be able to ascend. Other than getting a good idea of the grandeur of the room, nothing else could be seen through that tiny keyhole.
What we did see though was pretty cool and certainly not a typical day sightseeing. We saw some rooms filled with rubble and peeling paint work. There was a long, eerie corridor leading to more disheveled rooms and peeling walls.
In the first room there was a blocked out fireplace with a window above and some grubby blinds. Someone had planted a cow print sun lounger in there so yours truly here thought it’d be a great idea to lay in it! See, I did say we entered the building with as much common sense as we could muster, clearly in my case that was…less than an ample amount?
As we descended further down the pitch black corridors, each gingerly shining our phone torches around so as not to lose our footing, we came upon some abandoned toilet and shower areas with yellow shower curtains, dirty, dishevelled and almost theatrically positioned. There was a soap dispenser still filled with soap, half used toilet rolls and dusty net curtains trailing into rubble-filled white sinks and baby pink painted walls.
We found a very sinister looking little staircase which we ascended and found a very interesting room filled with paintings seemingly aimed at children on the walls and real plants growing at one side of the room next to a pile of artificial plants and a few scattered children’s Christmas pictures on the other. The juxtaposition of abandoned-room-debris with bright, colourful paintings initiated an unsettled feeling.
I wonder what the story was here.
Why was this room abandoned and these pictures just left here?
How long had they been there and who had created them? I’m sure there are some people that have all the answers. Please get in touch if that is you!
This blog post however is purely to showcase some of the interior of the much stigmatised mental asylum in it’s abandoned state and to catch your intrigue. I certainly can not claim to be a big researcher on the place – see the end of this article for some links for further reading if you would like to gain more of an insight into the history of the place and some real life experiences of people that have lived and worked there.
There was quite a bit of graffiti around those glum back rooms; some amusing, some just plain offensive and crude which we refused to take photos of because the people that did that should be ashamed of themselves. But this one below I personally quite liked:
There were also lots of humorous things planted around the rooms such as magazines that said Asylum on them but were dated Spring 2017 and an article lurking on a staircase entitled Victims Screamed for Help. It was about the rollercoaster crash at Alton Towers in 2015 and someone clearly thought it would be amusing to meticulously plant it in an abandoned mental asylum…along with a strangely eerie looking Equine magazine and a Gary Lineker scandal thrown in for good measure.
It made me wonder just how many people had done the same thing we were doing; exploring the darkened back rooms of this abandoned mental asylum. I guess you have urbexers though, who genuinely want to explore without causing harm, but then you have vandalisers who want to go and cause trouble, by doing things such as graffitiing the walls with offensive language and causing physical damage. Urbexing is always a risk and shoudn’t be taken lightly. There is a group you can join if you are interested in finding out more, but always remember to do it safely if you are going to.
I can see the humour of it all, and we were laughing at things as we went round. But it is easy for the people of today to have a sense of detachment from the life and times of the asylum and just find it ‘a bit freaky and weird.’ The research I’ve done on High Royds since I visited has been anything but a laughing matter. Many patients lived miserable lives and suffered inhumane deaths there during its active years.
Victorian society still wasn’t fully equipped to be able to deal with people with mental health issues. So people with ailments that, today seem quite commonplace and widely accepted – such as panic attacks or agrophobia which nowadays can be treated quite well with appropriate care and support – were more or less hidden away in these asylums with no one knowing quite what to do with them. It was seen as shameful for them and for their family.
Asylums were very primitive in terms of their care of mental health patients that, not so long before, were treated as hardened criminals.
Interestingly though, High Royds was actually a leading hospital in the research of medication to treat mental illnesses and began to go beyond the popular but grim treatments, such as labotomies, that were being widely used at the time. The future started to look a little brighter for the world of mental health as people started to realise that just shutting people off from society was not necessarily the best option. Society was changing its attitude. Please read more on this here in a very well researched essay about High Royds by Dr Francesca Roe who is a Leeds based researcher.
I thought this old, torn notice board rota was very interesting, if not a little eerie and I figured it was used for some kind of scheduling system for the staff or the patients.
This is a very interesting documentary about asylums and their prominence and subsequent demise. It is well worth a watch if you’re into stuff like this. Also, this is a fantastic write up from a man who worked at High Royds for ten years whilst he trained to be a mental health nurse. His memories of High Royds are very special to him and he clearly seems to have felt like part of a real close-knit community during his time there, something I find really interesting. A place that generally speaking has a bad reputation, brought happiness to many people with them feeling very much part of a community.
I found this to be a curious adventure, and it was my first time urbexing. High Royds really is an enchanting building for all that has happened within its walls. The clock tower is so striking and the building has appeared in many filming productions over the years. Menston and nearby Ilkley boast some very beautiful countryside.
Even if you opt out of breaking in to the back rooms of an abandoned mental hospital for kicks, do consider exploring these very beautiful and underrated parts of Yorkshire and one of the most intriguing buildings in England. You won’t be disappointed. This cat says so.
