Monday 8 November 2010

If you go down in the woods today

Your in for a disused mental health hospital. Sat just outside Bristol lies Barrow Gurney hospital, a former mental health unit for Bristol area once branded the dirtiest hospital in the UK after examiners found a trail of errors and failings now shut since 2006. Now it lies overgrown and abandoned subject to a summary execution from the bulldozer in what looks to be an abstract pattern of demolition and failed planning attempts. The remaining wards now stripped of traces and prepped for demolition still leave clues to its past murals painted in the children's wards now draped in police tape from training exercises, and the odd bit of paperwork forgotten marked with notes about health and safety and the latest drug available. They all leave traces of the former for those brave enough to face the stench of the damp and mold, but still complete with the hospital smell from years of cleaning still lingering, clinging on in some hope to keep some sense of past identity in the stripped out wards and corridors.