Local Area Photos

It’s been a while since I updated here, but I’ve spent quite a lot of time recently taking pictures in my local area, both around the university campus, and around where I live. I’d been needing to go exploring on foot around where we live for quite a while, it feels quite wrong to me to live somewhere and not know the area like the back of my hand. I guess it goes back to times when I was younger, where the only real way to get out of the house was to go wandering on foot. These days its not very often that I leave the house other than by car, and usually its when I’m heading to the university anyway which doesn’t count. So yeah, I went for a walk towards the railway lines, and beyond. What I found was interesting, I already knew vaguely what was in that direction but not well enough to know precisely how far away.

The first thing I found on my walk was a lovely housing estate, really quiet and quite well to do. I’d quite like to live there I think. Then the path crossed the railway line and I found a house on the edge of some wide open grass with an old iron gate in the garden that had been taken off it’s hinges and left there at some point. I think it had been taken from the fence next to the house, but I can’t be sure. Anyway the more interesting thing was the sign attached to the old gate, a sign for “Royal Albert Hospital” in true NHS brown. I can only guess that when the hospital was open, the grounds started at the edge of the railway line, which is pretty amazing. At this point the hospital was merely a tower in the distance. I’d been intrigued by the hospital buildings before now, it’s yet another amazingly impressive gothic mental asylum in Lancaster, this one built in 1864. All I can think is that Lancaster must have had an awful lot of people deemed by the local authorities to be crazy given the sheer amount of provision for locking them up that existed. The hospital operated as a school for people with learning disabilities, and a secure premises for others. It closed it’s doors in 1996. I found a fantastic website dedicated to chronicling the hospital and it’s history – Unlocking The Past. Some of the stories on there are really interesting, for example the hospital had it’s own scout troop for the boys being held there, who used to go on camping expeditions in the grounds! It’s now being used as a islamic girls boarding school, so I couldn’t really go trespassing on the ground to take photos. There are plenty around on the Internet though if you go searching.

Moving on from there I went across the road to look at a derelict boarded up building which seems to have once belonged to the NHS. “The Derby Home”. There are references to a Derby Home on the Royal Albert website, as being a ward for “higher-grade” male patients, but I am not sure this is the same place, it seems strange it would be so far away from the rest of the hospital. It was quite an nice building to look at though, I’d love to know what’s still inside.

My next stop was the cemetery, which was a large and eerily peaceful place. I found a gravestone from someone who died in the “Blackpool Sea Tragedy” in 1983, a member of the Lancashire Constabulary and that led me to researching the event when I got home. Very sad, but something I am glad I’m at least aware of happening I suppose, I don’t think I would have known otherwise. After that I headed home, all in all a very rewarding walk, and a few interesting photos though not very artistic.