Voices in the Walls: The Social Afterlife of Asylum Architecture and the Heritage Politics of Mental Health in North Wales, led by Professor Lucy Huskinson, begins in January 2027. The application was rated 9 out of 10, ‘outstanding’, by AHRC.
Opened in the mid-nineteenth century as the only psychiatric hospital in Wales to treat patients through the medium of Welsh, ‘Denbigh Asylum’, later known as North Wales Hospital, closed for good in 1995. In the thirty years since, its dramatic ruins have drawn urban explorers and ghost-hunting TV crews from across the world. The building has featured on Most Haunted Live! on Sky Living TV in a programme called ‘Village of the Damned’ and was even the subject of a suggested plan to repropose it as a ‘horror hotel’. Today parts of the site are undergoing redeveloped. The hospital also appears in the 1961 Welsh language novel, Un Nos Ola Leuad, hailed as one of the greatest novels in Welsh literature.
The research team say that amid all the spectacle, the real story of the building itself has been lost: how it was conceived and received, how it was built, how it changed, and how it has been seen and fought over ever since. Over the next three years they will comb bilingual archives, letters, diaries, and newspapers dating back to the building’s earliest planning in the 1840s, while also gathering the public’s own memories, feelings and images of its life.
That research will feed a bilingual and accessible website built around an immersive 3D reconstruction of the hospital. On the website, people will be able to explore the hospital online or, via VR headsets, as an in-person ‘walk-through.’ These will be woven together with oral histories, soundscapes, and archive images of the building. A touring exhibition will visit various Cultural Centres within the Asylum/Hospital’s original catchment area. There will be special showing at the National Eisteddfod in 2029, alongside free bilingual teaching resources for schools and a policy paper for planners and heritage bodies working with other sensitive historic sites.
The team working on the project would like to hear from anyone with photographs, film, drawings, letters, or artworks connected to the hospital. This includes its interiors, exteriors, specific rooms or grounds, from any point in its life, whether fully functioning, at the time of its closure, during its long years of dereliction, or as it faces redevelopment today. Former staff, patients, and their families, urban explorers, Denbigh residents, and anyone else with something to contribute are invited to come forward and help build a permanent, crowd-sourced archive of the site.
Professor Lucy Huskinson, Project Lead, said: “I’m grateful that this remarkable building, and the many lives it’s lived, from its inception, through dereliction, to its plans for redevelopment, will be preserved in memory for future generations. If you've a photograph tucked away in a drawer, an old home video, film footage as an urban explorer, or a memory or feelings attached to any part of the building whatsoever (even just a crack in the wall!), we want to hear from you. Every contribution helps us build a fuller, truer picture of what this building has meant to this community and to Wales, and that, to me, is what makes it valuable: it hands this heritage back to the people who actually lived it, rather than leaving it to developers or ghost stories or academics.”
The project also lays the groundwork for a longer-term ambition. Denbighshire County Council, which owns the site and is a formal partner on the project, is already progressing its plans to restore the Grade II* Main Range building and convert it into residential apartments but has identified the site’s historic chapel as an opportunity to give the project’s exhibition a permanent home, alongside a lasting space for community use.
Councillor Hugh Evans, Leader of Denbighshire County Council and Lead Member for Economic Growth, Corporate Governance and Tackling Deprivation for said: “The Former North Wales Hospital site holds a special place in the hearts of many people in Denbigh and its surrounding areas, and the project undertaken by VRƵ will offer an opportunity for the community to remember what was such a significant part of Denbigh’s history. I would encourage anyone who may have anything relating to the Former North Wales Hospital and would like to donate it towards the project to contact the project team at VRƵ”.
Professor Edmund Burke, Vice-Chancellor of VRƵ, said: "VRƵ is proud to support this vital piece of work. The North Wales Hospital holds a complex and significant place in the history of Wales and of the Welsh language, and this project will ensure that history, in all its difficulty and importance, is properly recorded and made accessible for future generations. I'm particularly pleased to see this research led with such care for the people whose lives were bound up with the building, and I look forward to seeing the project's ambitions for the site's chapel take shape in the years ahead."
