Hampshire County Lunatic Asylum

The Hampshire County Lunatic Asylum, later Knowle Mental Hospital and Knowle Hospital, was a psychiatric hospital near the town of Fareham in Hampshire, southern England, opened in 1852 and closed in 1996. It was built under the provisions of the Lunacy Act 1845 and admitted over a thousand patients at its peak. Nowadays the site is primarily a residential development, although an NHS establishment still offers psychiatric accommodation.

History
By the mid 1800s the County Asylums Act and Lunacy Act had made it a requirement that every United Kingdom county should build an asylum if they had not already done so, or should join with another neighbouring county to achieve the same goal. For the Hampshire asylum, a 100 acre site was located, known as Knowle Farm, close to Fareham. Purchased towards the end of the 1840s, work began on the asylum - to be known as the Hampshire County Lunatic Asylum - in 1850, and the asylum took its first patients in December 1852.

By 1856 the asylum had expanded to take 400 patients, and the growth continued throughout the century - with over 1,000 patients at the asylum by 1900. Both male and female patients were admitted, and were expected to work on the farm, in the kitchens and in other trades to help support their community.

Knowle Halt, a small railway station on the Eastleigh to Fareham line, served the asylum from 1907. The station, close to the village of Funtley, was closed in 1964. Trains from the Meon Valley Railway, a cross-country railway in Hampshire, also served Knowle Halt.

The asylum was renamed Knowle Mental Hospital in 1923 and then became Knowle Hospital in 1948, finally closing in 1996. Secure accommodation for patients with mental illness is still provided by Ravenswood House, whose buildings are adjacent to the old hospital.

Over 5,500 former patients of the asylum are buried in Knowle Cemetery, south of the grounds. Prior to 1886 the burial locations were not recorded. Up to four patients could be buried in the same plot, although never on the same day. The last burial at the site took place in 1971. A few remaining iron crosses, used to mark the graves, were removed from the site in 2001 for secure storage, pending a decision to relocate them.

Genealogy
All documents and records of the asylum that still exist are held by the Hampshire Records Office in Winchester. The accession number for the collection is 48M94/ and many records relating to former patients are held, including admissions information, case notes, discharge and death registers, postmortem reports and a burial register. A number of these records are contained in volumes that are still subject to a 100-year closure rule; any work on those volumes, for records outside the closure period, must be undertaken by an archivist at the records office on behalf of the public.

Current use
From 2000 onwards, the site was redeveloped by Berkeley Homes as Knowle Village - an exclusive development of apartments (using the former hospital buildings) and new houses over 53 acres of the grounds. The principal northern (east-west) building, northern administration building, administrator's house, chapel and staff cottages were retained and converted to other uses, whilst the central north-south connecting structure and south block were demolished. 130 of the 520 new dwellings were created within existing buildings.

The Chapel was refurbished by Berkeley Homes, at a cost exceeding £400,000, who later transferred ownership of the building to Winchester City Council for £1, with an additional gift of £28,000 to provide some funding for future maintenance costs. The building is now leased by the Knowle Chapel Buildings Association for community use.

Other sources and links

 * National Archives: Knowle Hospital Records
 * Fareham Borough Council - Knowle Village information
 * Wickham Parish Council page on Knowle Village
 * Wickham Parish Council page on Knowle Cemetery
 * Photographs from Knowle Cemetery
 * Hampshire Records Office, Winchester