EXPLORE
THE STORY
The story of Linehan Vale essentially starts in 1820 when a stately home was planned on the site in the Allerdale district of what was then the county of Cumberland. The home was to be in the Palladian style. However, due to changing fortunes of the family, building work on the house ceased in 1821 leaving the structure of outer walls floors less than half finished. With bare exterior walls and no roof, the building became a local oddity as it was a curious hybrid of ruin and building-site and was, essentially, abandoned.
This limbo continued until 1848 when the structure was purchased off the family, along with the estate. The intention being to complete the building work and re-purpose it as a private asylum and sanatorium, due to its remote location and countryside. This plan succeeded and the structure was finished while an architectural update was given to reflect the more neo-gothic tastes of the mid-century. The building layout was heavily adapted to incorporate two patient wings on either side of the original building so that the site conformed to a Corridor Plan which was popular with asylum designers at the time.
(known locally as "Linehan Vale" or "Banters") is a sprawling dis-used hospital complex in the UK. It's situated in Cumberland, flanked by the wooded hills and village of Croxley Heath and residing on a gently subsiding hill overlooking the town of Banterbury. Surrounded by a canal to the East and a railway line to the West, the still-operating Slade Prison (which is of a similar age and experienced an inmate escape attempt in the late '70s) is just under twenty miles away. Also, the ruins of the infamous and reportedly haunted Allerdale Hall (which has a previous connection to Linehan Vale) can just be glimpsed over the trees, around five miles away, as can the town of Scarfolk.
The original site contained a modest stately home (Thornton Reed Hall, built in the 1820s in a Palladian style), which was converted to an asylum in the 1870s after being abandoned for ten years. The current complex was constructed between 1880 and 1882, following increased pressure for a new county asylum to take the pressure off Garlands (known back then as the Cumberland and Westmorland Joint mental hospital). The new construction heavily modified the original asylum's main building, which was by then already over 60 years old. The new site was modelled with a more quintessentially high-Victorian, style with a "Linear Corridor" plan, with wards flanking off the original building in a long line. The new design was overseen by architect C.H Howell and his company.
A major expansion and re-modelling of the entire site occurred in 1905 resulting in Linehan Vale adopting not only a warmer and softer Edwardian architectural style but also the highly successful asylum layout plan called the "Compact Arrow". This redevelopment was overseen by architect G.T Hine, who in order to achieve the compact arrow system, had to demolish much of the ward blocks built in the 1880s. Once again, this left the administration building as one of only original structures from the 1820s. G.T Hine went on to build Long Grove Hospital after supervising most of the new builds at Linehan.
All these developments occurred despite the land experiencing a long-term problem with subsidence, due to the foundations being built on the county's unique, soft red clay. During the hospital's height of use in the inter-war years, there were upwards of 5,000 people living, working, recovering (and occasionally escaping from!) the hospital site.
The large-scale use of external corridors resulted in the rise of Linehan's tolerated yet oddly enchanting (and downright confusing!) network of interconnecting corridors, rivaling those of Colchester's Severalls Hospital. By 1923, Linehan would lay claim to the dubious(?) and thoroughly unsubstantiated honour of having the most corridors of any hospital site in the country, leading to those at the hospital to joke that there more corridors at Linehan than canals in Venice! And, after a few years of this folklore, it is indeed the peculiar reason why each outer corridor is thus named (informally) after a Venetian waterway.
Linehan also had it's own light-railway, connected to the mainline, which ensured the site always had regular coal, oil and food deliveries as well as whatever else it needed to function. Passengers also travelled on the railway to and from the site, using two small station buildings. A section of staff-only track carried the coal and maintenance supplies under the hospital into the boiler-room complex using part of the tunnel network. Two locomotives provided traction - an electric one called "Lewis" and an unfortunate steam engine called "Skipper".
When the NHS was born in 1948, Linehan Vale Asylum was re-christened, simply to Banterbury Hospital. By the late1960s, with mental healthcare reform on the horizon across the nation, Banterbury effectively entered it's retirement age, beginning with the closure of it's railway station, followed by the demolition of two of it's three water towers in the late '70s. However, it was the mental health act in 1983 that put Banterbury on full-life support. The outer wards and blocks began to close over the next decade, the extremities became disused, limb by limb until mostly only the historic admin block - always the heart of any hospital - was still fully functioning. With 95% of its patients now vacated in care-in-the-community programmes by 1995, the remaining 25 patients were cared for in hastily re-furbished rooms and wards in the main admin block for the last two years.
In 1997, the entire site slipped-away on a Friday afternoon with the last of the patients and staff driven away in three minibuses. That was the official end to the hospital's duties, except for the archive and administration offices in the main block which remained in-use until these too, closed in 2000. A discarded poster of the popular 90s's music group "B*Witched" has become one of the first iconic sights to see when entering the site through the admin block, along with the unusual "lady in the bath" mural/graffiti art on the 1st floor and the 2nd floor's plethora of discarded vacuum cleaners which are frequently re-arranged into amusing, terrifying or genuinely baffling formations for photographs (or bizarre rituals! It's certainly a possibility!)
The site was bought from the BCC by "Solid As A Rock!" American construction firm Bluth Company in 2003. Bluth Company's plan is to build a thousand affordable new homes despite the fact that the historic admin block/main building is now a listed landmark, which the company has stated "will be cared-for down to the last brick". Neverthless, Since 2003 the radiators have remained cold forever, the last lighting circuit was disconnected from the national grid in 2009, and the last light to be lit by the emergency batteries darkened in 2010. The water-tower clock has been stopped since 2017 after a brief fire, which was either started simply by random vandals or perhaps by random vandals somehow employed by the Bluth Company (depending on who you ask).
The hospital has therefore remained mostly abandoned, except for occasional security guard patrols, many visiting urbexers (such as yourself), unwelcome vandals/hired arsonists and a mysterious local woman who is the self-proclaimed "protector" of the asylum. It is she who is is armed with/accompanied by two vocal yet surprisingly friendly lurcher dogs. Informally nicknamed "Lady Silence" by curious and appreciative urbexers, she and her dogs have overseen numerous thwarted attempts to steal the copper pipes, fireplaces and roofing tiles, which are always a prime target for thieves on such sites. Also, there's bonus points for spotting the local deer who wander the site, inside and out!
In 2019, three live-in property guardians now reside in the usable areas of the admin block, making use of the on-site Milford Cubicle porta cabins for toilets). They also apparently shot a low-budget horror film in the basement tunnels about a heavy-metal band, according to a newspaper report, but it's yet to appear on Netflix or the DVD shelf at Poundland so I see. Also, the New Orleans metal band Cane Hill filmed a music video here for their single Solway Firth Spaceman, recently. Tins of decades' old food and drink have been found in the cellars, machines and store-rooms, some of which have ended-up on sale on Ebay and then even opened-up on on camera to entertain Youtube viewers who enjoy the AMSR sounds of hissing old cans being opened, perhaps.
Linehan Vale/Banterbury has seen off many a foe in its almost 140 year history, including the Luftwaffer, arson and the uncaring embrace of mother nature. Despite it being an asylum and starting out life as such in age of mental health ignorance, which arguably continued until it's closure, the hospital is fondly remembered by many of it's patients and most of it's staff for being, ultimately, a warm and peaceful institution that avoided the medical infamy and social stigma of many of its contemporaries in the UK and around the world. Though Banterbury's fate is uncertain - as of 2019, it is still earmarked for "affordable" housing development - it'll always live on, somehow.
Wards:
Dagless
Ashens
Blakes
Francesco Calvano. 2019