We have been busy at work, but as you may have noticed, not on this website. TheTimeChamber has been part of the team that has resurrected the old County Asylums website. It was a lot of hard work over the past few years, but it is back!
Below is a copy of their welcome back blog post:
Welcome to county asylums. If you remember the original site you’ll probably know what the old one was about. Maybe even remember what it looked like. If you don’t then maybe take a second to read the about page. Here’s the old site, just for nostalgia purposes:
Sadly, the original website and domain name disappeared in early 2012.
The good news is, as you can see, we’re back and even better than before (well, we think so anyway.) – we’ve comprehensively covered all the county asylums and some more on top of that. We know the subject of the asylums can be a sensitive one. We’re not here to glamorise what they were because we know not all of it was good. However we shouldn’t just forget about these buildings because of what went on once built. From a purely architecture point of view these buildings ranked amongst some of the most impressive designs of the time and some of the logic behind the designs was ground breaking.
It’s been a project that started not long after the original site disappeared. 3 years work and we’ve finally made it. Where as it was just Pete before we’re now a nicely sized team of 4 and we’ve enjoyed working together.
You’ll notice not everything has been finished. There is a history or two still add and some sites will have none or limited internal and external photos. Obviously there will be locations where it simply will be impossible to obtain many internals (Broadmoor for starters) and others that were simply demolished before the turn of the 20th century (Hull). However we felt we needed to get the site on-line and share what we’ve accomplished so far. What we really hope is many of you reading this may have pictures, postcards, memories or interesting information you can contribute to this site. We’ve already been helped by a great number of people already (you’ll find these names on the about page – thank you to all of you, once again) but if you can help us make this site even better then please drop us an email – info@countyasylums.co.uk
As time goes by we hope to continue to improve the details of the asylums listed and add additional institutions as we can. We’ve plenty of avenues, not least starting with the Scottish asylums. So thanks for visiting and please keep an eye on the blog as we’ll post updates/interesting news as we go.
Thanks,
The County Asylum Team.