Historic Building Details

HB Ref No:
HB25/15/009 D

Address :
Knockbracken Hall Knockbracken Healthcare Park Saintfield Road Belfast County Down BT8 8BH

Townland:
Ballydollaghan

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Survey 2:
B2

Date of Listing:
27/02/2013 00:00:00

Date of De-listing:

Current Use:
Hall

Former Use
Hall

Conservation Area:
No

Industrial Archaeology:
No

Vernacular:
No

Thatched:
No

Monument:
No

Derelict:
No

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OS Map No:
147/14SE

IG Ref:
J3579 6767

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Owner Category

Health Board

Exterior Description And Setting

A double height recreational hall built c.1910 to designs by George Thomas Hine of London, supervised by Belfast architects Graeme-Watt and Tulloch. Rectangular plan form with rear abutments and alteration to the front as described below. Located within the Knockbracken Health Estate, west if the Saintfield Road, south of Belfast. Pitched natural slate roofing with terracotta ridge tiles; cast-iron ogee moulded rainwater goods; red brick chimney with corbelled coping with lead-flashing. Red-brick walling laid to Flemish Bond; artificial dress stone; dentiled cornice course. Round-headed timber casement windows with spoked glazing bars over nine squared panes; masonry cills with recessed apron. Replacement timber doors. The principal gable faces south-west and is symmetrically arranged, comprising a large segmental arched timber framed window with large central key stone; the gable is decorated with moulded brickwork forming an open-bed pediment with upper string course. The gable porch (former projection room added c.1940) is centrally located, and extended to either side (c.1980) with timber framed port-hole windows. Flanking the porch are the original lean-to entrance porches; casement windows instated in place of the doors; plinth made good with matching details. The left elevation is symmetrically arranged; six windows wide separated by single-stage buttresses with moulded plinth course, moulded cornice and surmounted by large steep pitched coping stone terminating at eaves level. Side exit located at ground floor level left of centre; stone lintel. The rear gable is abutted by a symmetrical arrangement of gable ended blocks with matching details, comprising a central double height block, further abutted to either side by mirroring single-storey bays. The side abutments have round-headed windows to gable with single and bi-partite segmental-arched windows to either cheek. Adjacent to the southwest cheeks are side entrances diminished windows over. The right elevation mirrors the left. Setting: Situated north of the Knockbracken Healthcare Park (formerly Purdysburn Villa Colony Asylum Complex), occupying a parkland site of 275 acres, to the west side of Saintfield Road. The
setting is largely unchanged since the early twentieth-century and the parkland is largely intact. The building has group value with adjacent hospital buildings (HB25/15/009A-J). Car park to the rear. Roofing: Natural slate Walling: Red Brick Windows: Timber casement RWG: Cast-iron

Architects

Watt and Tulloch

Historical Information

The recreation hall at Purdysburn Villa Colony was added to the site as part of a phase of expansion that took place between 1907 and 1912. The building is first shown on the fourth edition OS map of 1920-21 on a rural site adjoining the former Purdysburn House of 1825 (now gone) as part of a collection of villas and a hospital that are together captioned ‘Belfast District Asylum (Purdysburn Villa Colony)’. The asylum buildings are not separately listed in valuation records. The recreation hall was designed, as were the other buildings on the site, by Graeme, Watt and Tulloch of Victoria Street, Belfast. (Original plans; Irish Builder; Valuation records) The building of the recreation hall reflects the enlightened attitude to mental health that was promulgated by pioneering Medical Superintendent William Graham and his architectural advisors. The hall was built to seat 800 and was equipped with concert stage and scenery for dramatic productions and a cinema projector. A library in the building was run by a male patient and tennis courts were laid out on the terrace. The original drawings for the building, which have survived, show that it was originally entered by two side doors. This arrangement has been altered c1950 to give a central pedimented entrance door and porch. (Original architects’ drawings) Purdysburn appears to represent the earliest and most fully realised example in Britain or Ireland of the ‘villa colony’ design of lunatic asylum and as such should be seen as an important landmark in the history of asylum architecture. The colony model can, with hindsight, be seen both as the peak of a century-long evolution of asylum design and as a swan song in terms of centralised mass treatment of the mentally ill. Few asylums on this scale were built after the opening decades of the twentieth century, but it is a measure of the flexibility of the ‘villa colony’ model that Purdysburn, albeit renamed and contracted in size, continues to provide mental health services to this day in a radically altered healthcare environment. (Notes on Asylum Architecture) The use of the term ‘colony’ to describe a therapeutic community has a long history going back to at least the early nineteenth century and perhaps beyond. At Gheel in Belgium, for example, a pilgrimage site for the sick and insane, visitors had boarded out with villagers since the Middle Ages, and this boarding-out arrangement, copied elsewhere, became known as a ‘family colony’. However, it was not until the closing decades of the twentieth century that medical authorities began to conceive of a ‘colony’ model for the treatment of the insane, epileptics, the ‘mentally deficient’ and even the unemployed which would consist of a collection of villas around central administration facilities, as at Purdysburn. This style of community was first widely practised in Germany and the United States and it is these examples that are quoted in early discussions of the idea, but in 1900 when William Graham, Medical Superintendent of the Committee of Management of Purdysburn Lunatic Asylum, then housed in the former Purdysburn House, persuaded the committee to erect their new asylum for the city on the Villa Colony principle, there were no examples of such a colony for the insane in Britain or Ireland. (Notes on Asylum Architecture; Thomson; Irish Times; Reuber) For Graham, the colony offered several clear advantages over the asylum architecture of the past. The villas were intended to be ‘homely’, allowing patients to be socialised in a semi-domestic environment with an intimate atmosphere. They permitted the insane to be ‘classified’ according to mental and physical condition. Additionally, the patients, who were overwhelmingly working-class, could benefit from the idyllic rural setting at a time when mental problems tended to be seen as the result of overwork in an industrial environment. Productive physical labour, was however, seen to be important to the healing process and patients were set to work growing their own food, a strategy which benefitted the asylum as well as the patients. Administrators also found much to their liking in the colony principle. It addressed the problem of institutional overcrowding as colonies could expand villa by villa as necessary with minimal disruption and the costs were lower than building and maintaining a traditional asylum. Graham was later to state categorically, “This system, as everybody knows, or ought to know, is the fruit of the highest scientific study in the care of the insane, and springs from the two dominant principles of our time – exact and accurate knowledge and a love of humanity which counts no sacrifice too great for the sake of those who have been grievously handicapped in the race of life”. (Irish Times; Notes on Asylum Architecture; Thomson; Reuber) When Purdysburn was begun it was envisaged that all the mental patients in Belfast would eventually move there. These patients had been housed in the Belfast Union workhouse in the Lisburn Road and in an asylum of 1829 on the site now occupied by the Royal Victoria Hospital. The Grosvenor Road asylum reflected prevailing attitudes about mental health at the time it was built and was of a prison-like design, comprising numerous single cells with small, heavily-barred windows. High walls surrounded the building, the purpose of which was to protect the public from the inmates. (Reuber) Perhaps understandably, however, the Management Committee proceeded cautiously with the new asylum at Purdysburn. Work began on the first two villas in 1902, to designs by Graeme Watt and Tulloch and these were completed in 1904. Meanwhile, London County Council had been to the United States to investigate the ‘cottage system’ in Maryland USA and reported favourably on it in 1902. They adopted a dispersed plan for their epileptic colony at Ewell which was completed the following year in 1903 and dispersed units were added to its nearby lunatic asylum at Long Grove (1903-7), although the plan of this building was still largely formal and symmetrical with attached pavilions. A dispersed plan was also adopted in some Poor Law ‘imbecile’ colonies such as Monyhull Hall in Birmingham (1908) and Prudhoe near Newcastle (1913), but no other lunatic asylums appear to have been purpose-built as fully dispersed villa colonies, until the construction of Shenley in Middlesex in 1934-7, which was built around a pre-existing mansion and outbuildings. Purdysburn was, to a large extent, the architectural pioneer in this field. In 1906, Purdysburn was visited by the Royal Commission on the Care and Treatment of the Feeble-minded, who wished to see the working of the ‘villa system’. The same year, as two further villas neared completion, the Belfast Asylum Committee demonstrated their confidence in the new system by stating their intention to complete Purdysburn to accommodate the ‘entire insane of the city’ and by inviting George T Hine, architect to the English Lunacy Commissioners to ‘consult and advise generally the committee, medical superintendent and architects, regarding the laying down of the scheme on the Villa Colony system’. G T Hine, ‘the most accomplished and successful of asylum architects’ was a supporter of the colony idea, having been exposed to examples in Germany and the United States through the influence of psychiatrist T Knowles Stansfield and had incorporated dispersed units into his designs for Long Grove. Hine’s involvement at Purdysburn appears to have been largely conceptual, as the surviving drawings for the next stage which comprised the construction of four further villas, an administration building, recreation hall and hospital are signed by Graeme Watt and Tulloch. However, an article in the Irish Builder of June 1908 does suggest that Hine produced complete plans for the colony and that Hine was to visit the site before work began. The total cost was to be £110,000 and the new accommodation was to house patients transferred from Grosvenor Road and Ballymena. (Notes on Asylum Architecture; Thomson; Reuber) Protestant and catholic churches were completed in 1912 and further villas added. The same year the Lunacy Inspectors praised the ‘air of freedom and comfort and the pleasant and cheerful surroundings of Purdysburn’ which were ‘highly conducive to the physical health of the patients as well as to their mental recovery..There could be no question that for healthfulness and comfort the buildings and site at Purdysburn were unsurpassed by any public asylum in the United Kingdom’. And, added the inspector, this had been achieved ‘at moderate cost’. By 1914 more than two thirds of Belfast’s mental patients were housed in Purdysburn and Dr Graham remarked that, “The change from the old to the new order...was not a mere bodily transference from one place to another. Indeed for many of them it must mean almost as if they took part in a transformation scene. No longer with visions contained in narrow limits, they can enjoy the ever shifting scenery of earth and sky, and experience the healing influences of nature...it is impossible to exaggerate the significance of the work as a historical contribution to asylum care and management”. (Irish Times 27th June 1914) William Graham died suddenly in November 1917 and his work was then carried on by his nephew Dr S J Graham. In 1917 the original hospital building was extended and in 1927 three further villas, a gate lodge and Medical Superintendent’s residence added. In 1936, two further villas and an infirmary and reception block were completed as Belfast continued to grow and put sustained pressure on the accommodation. The number of patients peaked at over 1800 in the mid-1950s but now lies at around 300, largely due to changes in mental health provision and an increased emphasis on treating people within the community. The site is now shared with around thirty voluntary organisations who work in the healthcare field. References: Primary Sources 1.PRONI OS/6/3/9/3 Third Edition OS Map 1901-2 2.PRONI OS/6/3/9/4 Fourth Edition OS Map 1920-21 3.PRONI OS/6/3/9/5 Fifth Edition OS Map 1920-31 4.PRONI OS/6/3/9/7 Seventh Edition OS Map 1938 5.PRONI VAL/1/B/321 Townland Valuation (1828-40) 6.PRONI VAL/2/B/3/29 Griffiths Valuation (1861) 7.PRONI VAL/12/B/20/7A-F Annual Revisions (1864-1929) 8.PRONI VAL/12/F/4/9/3 – Annual Revisions (1930-35) 9.1901 census online 10.1911 census online 11.Irish Times, 23rd September 1903 12.Irish Times, 12th January 1905 13.Irish Times, 10th April 1906 14.Irish Times, 7th May 1906 15.Irish Times, 28th May 1907 16.Irish Times, 4th March, 1910 17.Irish Times, 19th May 1910 18.Irish Times, 6th August, 1910 19.Irish Times, 8th August 1912 20.Irish Times, 17th August, 1912 21.Irish Times, 14th December 1912 22.Irish Times, 18th October, 1913 23.Irish Times, 13th January 1914 24.Irish Times, 16th May 1914 25.Irish Times, 27th June 1914 26.Irish Times, 7th November 1917 27.British Medical Journal 17th November 1917 28.Irish Builder 10th April 1902 29.Irish Builder 20th April 1907 30.Irish Builder 18th April 1908 31.Irish Builder 27th June 1908 32.Irish Builder 31st October 1908 33.Irish Builder 28th November 1908 34.Irish Builder 12th December 1908 35.Irish Builder 28th January 1909 36.Irish Builder 1 May 1909 37.Irish Builder 29th May 1909 38.Irish Builder 26th June 1909 39.Irish Builder 10th July 1909 40.Irish Builder 19th February 1910 41.Irish Builder 18thFebruary 1911 42.Irish Builder 23rd August 1924 Secondary Sources 1.Craig, D H “Belfast and Its Infirmary – The Growth of a Hospital 1838 to 1948” 2.Mills, Jason “What’s He Building in There?” The Vacuum, Issue 15 3.Reuber, M “The architecture of psychological management: the Irish asylums (1801-1922)” Psychological Medicine, 1996, Vol 26, p.1179-1189 4.Roberts, Andrew ‘Notes on Asylum Architecture’ (available at http://studymore.org.uk/4_13_ta.htm) 5.Thomson, M “The Problem of Mental Deficiency, Eugenics, Democracy and Social Policy in Britain c1870-1959) Oxford Historical Monographs, 1996

Criteria for Listing

Architectural Interest

A. Style B. Proportion C. Ornamentation D. Plan Form H-. Alterations detracting from building I. Quality and survival of Interior J. Setting K. Group value

Historic Interest

Y. Social, Cultural or Economic Importance V. Authorship R. Age S. Authenticity T. Historic Importance

Evaluation

A double height recreational hall built c.1910 to designs by George Thomas Hine of London, supervised by Belfast architects Graeme-Watt and Tulloch. The hall forms part of the overall complex of structures, erected over the period 1907 - 1912 to facilitate what was previously known as Belfast District Asylum (Purdysburn Villa Colony). The classical detailing and proportions are relatively modest. Internally there has also been some alteration to the layout, although the hall remains largely intact, regardless of some inappropriate semi-permanent screens. There is considerable group value with a number of other buildings on the Knockbracken Healthcare Park site (HB25/15/009 A - J), and the entire complex is of interest as the earliest example of the colony model of asylum architecture in Ireland.

General Comments

Date of Survey

20 July 2011