As of late 2019, this project is around three years old and good old Banterbury/Linehan Vale asylum is, I'd say, it's around 40% completed. That's based on dividing the work into 50% construction involving cutting wood and gluing cardboard and then 50% involving the fine detail work to turn it all into an actual realistic miniature building. There's still two new bay windows, the entire roofing, one more wing and an extension of the base-board to complete before I can begin on the detailing work. Work seems to have quickened up now I've become more confident working with the materials to achieve somewhat desired results. A major aspect of the project which has taken a lot of time is in conforming the design to the real-life inspirations and the limitations of this medium and its specifications. Now that the layout of each floor is fixed and there's a definitive plan for how the end project could look, there's a feeling that though the end is not in sight yet, the eventual form is somewhat known. Therefore, my mind turns to what happens when it is indeed complete?

​

Firstly, what does completion look like - I would consider that Banterbury is essentially finished when this main building has been completely built, dressed, detailed and styled to look authentic. However, I potentially see this as a Phase One kind of thing. A Phase Two would most likely see further structures being created, and these would be:

​

• Two L-shaped two-storey extensions in the same architectural style containing wards and a main corridor extending out  to the left and right of the main model, just like the ones at Severalls and Whitchurch hospitals in order to properly convey the compact-arrow plan and the bat's wing-like look of it. 
   

• A grand barrel-roofed ballroom, with film-projector booth in the rafter and a stage. Such ballrooms are pretty iconic to asylums (nearly every film set in an asylum has some sort of dancing scene set in one!) and these structures have usually been the first to be destroyed by arson and decay. Banterbury's ballroom would most likely be a fairly faithful recreation of Hellingly's, although Sunnyside's gorgeous vaulted ballroom is also a contender. 
   

• A standalone water-tower and boiler house, with maintenance workshop, car garage and laundry facility. The narrow-gauge railway which runs underneath Banterbury to transport maintenance supplies and coal to the boilers will also serve these areas before continuing to the main station. These industrial areas of asylums tend to all look a bit generic, so it would be a mix and match of various hospital sites and what looks the most visually interesting to put into model form. The water tower would likely be of a similar style to Banterbury's recreation of Severalls, although perhaps a recreation of Whitchurch or Cane Hill's might add variety.
   

• Banterbury would also have it's own station set in the grounds which would be connected to the main-line track network (not to built - a massive model railway is a project for another life!). The narrow-gauge goods railway would terminate here, with the idea being that coal and stuff would be transferred from the mainline (standard gauge) trains to the carts.
  The station would probably look similar to Hellingly's, with inspiration from various stations I've seen in my life.
   

• And finally... a brualitst concrete block! It's entirely likely that during Banterbury's operational life several new buildings would have appeared to cope with increased patient numbers, etc. And of course these buildings would reflect not only new technologies and construction methods but also aesthetics of that era. It would be fun to create a section of the asylum which looked like it was built between the '50s and the '70s - so therefore a concrete slab of two-three floors featuring that streamlined, simple, pre-fabricated look that municipal buildings had at that time. Perhaps the entrance way could be a bit more grand, with a giant tiled mural and large doors so it has that mid-20th century benign institutional feel. A bonus would be that such a modernist building could also styled to look like the Romford hospital as featured in Garth Marenghi's Darkplace!!

​

​

​

​

​