Citylife in Lichfield July and August 2020

The Burntwood
Asylum at
St Matthew’s
By Jono Oates
..................
Today, St Matthew’s at Burntwood is known as a housing
estate and a social club but its history lies in the world of
hospitals and patient’s mental care as it was previously the
site of the Burntwood Asylum.
Public asylums started to be built after 1808 when the County
Asylums Act was passed and in 1845 it became compulsory for
counties to build them. There were three asylums in Staffordshire:
Burntwood; Cheddleton and at Stafford, the county town.
The Burntwood Asylum was designed by William Lambie Moffatt, a
Scottish architect who designed many churches, poorhouses,
workhouses and, from the 1850s onwards, many asylums. It was built
on a 94-acre site at Hobstone Hill, close to Woodhouses and
Christchurch and at an initial cost of £65,000.
The building was officially opened in December 1864 and had a
central block with two wings on either side, one for male patients
and one for female, with sufficient beds for 480 patients in total. The
site continued to expand and a churchyard was added, along with a
chapel which held a Mass for the local Roman Catholic congregation.
A bakehouse was also added and the site had its own gas and electric
supply, a fire brigade, a farm and gardens so that it eventually became
a fully self-contained unit, and community, in its own right.
A clock tower was built in 1921 which was provided by William
Worthington, whose family owned nearby Maple Hayes, now the
dyslexia school.
Due to its development the Burntwood Asylum became
recognised as one of the most efficient, and progressive, asylums and
soon patients were transferred from outside the local area, from
other counties including Worcestershire and Northamptonshire.
Following the First World War there was a new approach to the
issues, and treatment, of mental health and the asylum was renamed
as the Burntwood Mental Hospital. In World War II the hospital
added an additional emergency building which looked after casualties
from the frontline, many of whom were survivors from the Dunkirk
evacuation. After the war the emergency hospital was closed and the
Mental Hospital was renamed as St Matthew’s Hospital in 1948 and
was part of the newly-founded National Health Service mental health
services.
During the 1980s the new ‘Care in the Community’ programme
was rolled out, which meant that many patients were transferred to
private organisations and become part of community initiatives.
Large sections of St Matthew’s Hospital became abandoned and the
main building became vandalised and developed structural faults.
In 1995 St Matthew’s Hospital was closed down and, eventually, the
site was redeveloped as a housing estate. Over 300 houses were built
and the only parts of the original buildings that remained were the St
Matthew’s Social Club, along with the chapel and the administration
block, which was converted into apartments. In 2003 the chapel was
purchased by Busy Bees childcare and is now a children’s nursery.
The Burntwood Asylum was recognised as a leading example of
mental health provision in the 1860s and provided mental health care
for its patients up to the 1980s. Today the name of St Matthew’s still
provides a link to its past as one of only three asylums in the county
of Staffordshire.
Sources:
www.bfhg.org.uk (the Burntwood Family History Group);
The Staffordshire Asylum Records website
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