ST ANDREWS HOSPITAL

St Andrews Asylum

  Unfortunately there were only two buildings remaining when we made it here.

The History of St. Andrews Asylum.

The architects were Francis Stone and John Brown (Norfolk County Surveyors) and Robinson Cornish and Gaymer of North Walsham. The County Asylum was intended specifically for pauper lunatics and was only the second institution of its kind when completed in early 1814. The buildings were originally designed for the reception of 40 male patients in April 1814, followed by female patients in June of the same year. Roughly 70 patients were present on average in the early years.

Extensions in 1831 and 1840 allowed this number to double and more substantial additions in the late 1850s as well as the construction of an auxiliary asylum, which was completed in 1881, some 700 inpatients could be accommodated. The auxiliary asylum or annexe is situated to the north of the main buildings, on the other side of Yarmouth Road, connected by a lane that was carried over the main road by a bridge. In April 1889 the institution was re-titled the Norfolk County Asylum, and after its modernisation into ‘a hospital for mental disorders’ (with reorganisation into distinct male and female asylums) there was room for more than 1,000 patients. In February 2013 work started to demolish all buildings on the site of the auxiliary asylum, with only St Andrew's House, ie the water tower and the wing adjacent to both its sides, to be retained. According to Norfolk Heritage, a number of bricks with inscriptions dating from WW1 and WW2 carved into them have been recovered and preserved. Three years later the rubble has been cleared and the area they stood on tidied up, but no further work appears to have been done on the annexe. The only other building which has been left standing is the mortuary on the edge of the site. The hospital's first cemetery, used from 1814 until 1859, was situated south of the original hospital buildings. No trace of this burial ground remains although it is still marked on the map. It was replaced by the cemetery situated on land to the east of the auxiliary asylum which has since become a business park situated beside a new road called Peachman Way. The narrow green space adjacent to the roundabout at the end of a short road called Memorial Way is surrounded by huge warehouses. None of the hospital graves were marked, but the graves of the many Polish servicemen who were buried here during the war were all marked by iron crosses. In 1968, however, the Hospital Board decided to sell these crosses for scrap and today only the outlines of graves can still be discerned. The cemetery was rededicated in late 1980 and a memorial was set up at its centre.