Starcross Hospital. What the voices tell us. Instalment 2

 

Setting the scene:

Introduction 

 

 

Starcross Hospital closed in 1986 after some 120 years as an institution through which hundreds of people passed – and many remained in until their death. 

 

Founded by public subscription to train backward children from pauper homes, it became an “Idiot Asylum” and a place where people with physical disabilities such as deafness or epilepsy rubbed shoulders with people who were judged morally defective. 

 

Instead of taking in children to improve their future chances in life in the outside world, it took children and adults to “protect” the outside world from them, and them from it. 

 

Opinions varied at the time of the closure as to the institution’s success, and whether it should ever have existed or ever have closed.  Care in the community had taken its place and faced the test of time. 

 

The question then being asked was: How will it compare to the care in the hospital?  How will it turn out and mature? 

 

The collection of recorded interviews - made at the time that Starcross Hospital started to become a memory - sought to breathe life into the relics of the past, so that the lessons learned should not be forgotten, and in tribute to the hard work and intentions of so many people who spent much of their lives within those walls. 

 

The words may remind us why those walls have been demolished.