Seeking Asylum
I shot this back in 2006 as the final project for my MA in Documentary. It is a short documentary revisiting Whittingham Hospital, a huge derelict asylum. Featuring Ray Gosling, former Granada film-maker retracing his steps with the aid of a former patient and a team of dedicated urban explorers.
The original idea was to make a film about urban exploration, and to follow urban explorers entering abandoned buildings and locations across the country. The idea had to be refined and I chose to tell the story of Whittingham using urban exploration to make the film happen. In any other scenario this film could not have been made.
I had become an urban explorer myself, making new friends online and going on trips to all sorts of locations, such as derelict holiday camps, hotels, huge underground quarries and mysterious underground MOD sites. When exploring you feel like a time traveller, exploring a lost civilisation and trying to make sense of the artifacts left behind.
Through the help of one of the explorers called ‘Ste_Nova’, I managed to track down Ray Gosling giving a public talk in Wales. At the end of the talk we asked him about his film Whittingham and I asked if he would consider going back there for the film. I didnt expect him to be up for it but his enthusiasm for the project was unstoppable.
At 70+ he is full of life and up for adventure, he loved meeting the Urban Explorers, likening them to Urban Guerillas! On the day of the shoot, I was so worried we would get caught by security, would have to shelve the project, deal with the police and try to reassure my tutors what I was doing helping Ray Gosling scale a 6 foot security fence!
Luckily ‘Iansradios’ had the security aspect covered, being a former patient, he knew the place inside out (look out for him him barricading the doors at the start of the film!) With the real prospect of being caught, me and my camera operator Timo carried minimal kit and had to shoot it handheld with little time to stop and give direction, we just had to go with the flow and film the situation unfolding. It could have gone horribly wrong but Ray Gosling, with decades of television and radio presenting under his belt, knew exactly how to engage with the explorers and was not afraid to perform up to the camera when he felt the urge!
The original Granada documentary that features as archive footage in the film was one of Nick Broomfields early works for television, fresh from Film school, Nick and Ray were given a free reign to film whatever they liked while they lived at Whittingham for over a month. I think the approach was brilliant and gives one of the most authentic insights into life inside an institution such as Whittingham.
I always intended to make an unbiased film about the Hospital, so I included interviews with the staff and undertook a lot of research into the background of mental healthcare. I realised it is one of those sensitive topics that cant easily be written off as good or bad. Whittingham was a close-knit self-sufficient community where people were accepted for who they were. Society in those times had very dated views on mental illness, in todays world societies attitudes have improved but there is still some stigma attached to mental illness. That is something I wanted to challenge at the start of the film, to dispel the myths and stereotypes using the archive footage from Ray’s film to show the sort of people who lived there.
I have no doubt of the sincerity of the former staff nurses in the film, they cared for the patients like they were one big family, this is evident in their anger at the patient grave stones being removed from the cemetery. Perhaps it was theft, but it is quite something when graves go missing like that with no explanation. It seems that today’s society is not much more evolved than it was when we stuffed the mentally ill in workhouses and forgot about them. If those graves had belonged to anyone else there would be national uproar! Where are the newspaper headlines on the missing graves?
My commentary in the film is very minimal, so I hope the viewers can reflect on the topics and come to their own conclusions. I agree with Ray when he says it is a time that must not be forgotten. I think today’s society is trying to brush the history of mental health care under the carpet, like many other parts of our history. Anyhow, I will let you watch the film and make up your own mind.
