Report - Stannington Sanatorium Boiler House September 2019

[jST]

Pegswood bricks made near here i.e. near Buckley, North Wales.

I'd reckon they'd be more likely to come from the Pegswood Brickworks. (About 5 miles from here)

 

[dave]

you not see the old stone water tower near it? i climbed it a few months ago

I did see it but decided against it.

 

[dave]

I'd reckon they'd be more likely to come from the Pegswood Brickworks. (About 5 miles from here)

Quite right you would think it was pretty obvious.

 

[Norman D Landings]

Hello all - just registered after seeing this story, because I was a patient here in the early 80's - by which time it had long since ceased to be a sanatorium and was a children's hospital.
The site was very extensive and had obviously been a major hospital in its heyday - by 1980 it was a curious time-capsule of a place, with only a few wards operating, and many disused areas.
Of course, as kids we ran wild in there and explored every nook and cranny of the place.
I'll get the layout right in my head this evening and - probably tomorrow - give as complete a breakdown as I can of the site 'as was'.
There may be more to be seen on the site.

 

[Norman D Landings]

This took some doing, but here we go…
Stannington Hospital was an extensive site, and I’ll break it down into sections:

Overall layout:
The hospital site is accessed from Bet’s Lane, a B-road running North-to-South. Bet’s Lane forms the western edge of the site.
Access is via the Drive, which runs northeast to southwest across the site, dividing it in two.
The western end of the Drive is its junction with Bet’s Lane – the eastern end terminates at Whitehouse Farm
The area north of the drive is a triangle: it’s long edge runs along the drive, it’s short edge along Bet’s Lane, and it’s point is at the gate of Whitehouse Farm.
The area south of the drive is much larger, and I’ll divide it up into sections when I get to it.
It is, unfortunately, the most heavily redeveloped so much of what I describe south of the drive may now be entirely covered under new build housing.
The area north of the drive is reasonably flat, but once you cross the drive the ground slopes away quite steeply to the south.

North of the Drive:
Entering the Drive from Bet’s Lane and looking north, to your left, the first buildings you’d pass were four long, single-storey rectangular red-brick buildings, in two rows, oriented E-W.
These buildings predated the site’s use even as a sanatorium and we were told they dated from WW2, when the site had housed Italian POWs. I have no confirmation of that.
The northernmost row of two buildings were beyond the boundary of the hospital proper, and within the ‘Christmas tree plantation’ north of the site. Because of this, they may be a good bet to still remain intact.
Little fingers and simple window latches afforded entry to both of these buildings – there was nothing inside except military-style canvas cot beds which parted like tissue paper when we tried to lie on them, and wooden pigeon-hole type storage units with chicken-wire doors. Better fun was had by climbing on the roofs, level with the tops of the conifers, and watching finches wrestle with the fir cones.

The southern row of two buildings, nearer the drive, were used as classrooms by the on-site Hospital School.
The eastern one was for typing, with about twenty massive clunky manual typewriters on desks. (Yeah, that’s right… CSE typing, grade 4. Got mad skillz, yo.)
Moving along the drive, the western classroom building was set up with woodwork machinery and also contained a broken-down Ford Anglia used for car maintenance classes.

Between that classroom and the drive stood a large, red-brick concert hall. It was empty and disused, but stood open and unlocked and we were freely allowed to use it for indoor football. (At that time, nobody had thought of combining the words ‘health’ and ‘safety’ in the same phrase.)

Moving west along the drive, the next building you’d see on your left would be the boiler house Dave explored. We never got to do more than hover round the fringes here because it was always staffed.

North of the boiler house is the spectacular water tower Tez climbed. Climbing it was expressly forbidden and frequently done. The problem was that it’s a long damn climb. When the site was a working hospital, it was evens that somebody would catch sight of you mid-climb, and you’d get chewed out for it. “COME DOWN.” “I am coming down. You’re watching me come down.” “THAT’S ENOUGH OF YOUR CHEEK YOUNG MAN.” Totally worth it, the view is amazing.

Between the water tower and the rectangular brick buildings was a water tank for the site’s fire hoses. It was a grim, square concrete pit full of green-scummed water, surrounded by heavily overgrown steel security fencing.

Southwest of the boiler house and fronting onto the drive, was a fire station. This was a single-storey red-brick building, basically a double garage which housed a van with ladders and buckets, and the hospital minibus.

Continuing along the drive, next to the fire station was a wooden chalet-style building used as a play school for the younger children.

In a field behind that chalet, to the east of the water tower stood a disused and dilapidated wooden cricket pavilion. The ‘cricket pitch’ it stood in was not maintained and was basically just meadow.

The last building north of the drive before the road entered the farm was a large, (maybe four-storey?) Georgian red-brick Nurse’s Home.
This accommodation had been built when the hospital was a busy sanatorium and by 1980 was hugely disproportionate to the number of staff still employed there.
As it was only a very few staff wanted to live in a corridor bedroom in a largely deserted building in the back of beyond, so they had the run of the place.

That’s the extent of the site north of the drive circa 1980 – I’m confident of the layout and don’t believe I’ve missed anything.
Hopefully I’ll get a chance this afternoon to describe the first of the southern sections.

(Mods: if I've 'crossed the streams' here and turned this into a 'hospital sites' thread, please amend as you see fit.)

 

[Norman D Landings]

Disclaimer – I’m aware this entry stretches the definition of ‘report’.
It’s not so much an account of any contemporary exploration, but my recollections from a time when the site was in use. So… no pictures, sorry.
Hopefully my description of the site ‘as was’ may be of help to anyone who wants to look at it ‘as is’.
Bear with me while I nostalgia trip.

School area:
Looking right as you turn into the Drive, there was a short terrace of private houses, behind which was another conifer plantation.
That plantation ran along Bet’s Lane and separated the hospital site from the road.
At the eastern end of the terrace was a turn-off south into the gravel car park of the Hospital School.
Walking down that turn-off, you’d see some disused wards to your left – a playground ahead of you – and the school building beyond it.

The first of the ward blocks was a free-standing building. This was Ward 6 and it was considered the Holy Grail of the disused buildings as it was the hardest to get into and the only one with locked interior doors. Myself and another kid with equally little common sense got in up a drain pipe and via an upstairs bathroom window. We found a storeroom with shelving units that stopped only maybe a foot short of the ceiling – in which we saw an attic hatch. We climbed onto the top shelf, lay on our backs and ‘scooted’ along til we were under the hatch, then squirmed through it. There were several other attic hatches and they proved to be our way past the locked interior doors from then on. It was however, quite frighteningly tight to get back through on the return journey until we realised that you had to come out of the hatch face-down!

South of Ward 6 was Ward 5, which was the first of the recognisable ‘sanatorium pattern’ wards: long rectangular buildings with covered verandas onto which TB patient’s beds would be wheeled so they could benefit from sunlight. Ward 5 ran West-to-East – its western short end faced the car park, its far, eastern short end butted up against the main hospital building which I’ll describe in the next section. Ward 5 was accessible through an interior door from the main building, but it was completely empty.

At right-angles to Ward 5, running N-S and forming the eastern side of the playground, was Ward 4. It was a carbon copy of 5’s layout and was also empty and disused.

The playground itself was filled with heavy steampunk-looking play equipment that looked like it had been forged in some industrial revolution armaments foundry: teapot lid, witch’s hat, and a shuggy boat. The hinges and hubs of those things would have effortlessly ground a careless child’s hand to a fine paste. We loved it.
Also, it has to be said it didn’t bother us in the slightest that we played surrounded on two sides by the dark, empty windows of abandoned TB wards.

Beyond the playground was the school building. This was a handsome single-storey building of white-painted stone, with a sprawling layout like a capital H.
Offices, library and the assembly hall made up the central E-W bar of the H, with classrooms forming the ‘vertical’ strokes.
On the western side of the school building were stairs down to a basement level boiler house. This had no door, and was always ankle-deep in stagnant water and filled with malodorous steam.
The assembly hall, in the centre of the school, faced south and had an uninterrupted view across the sloping fields to St Mary’s Psychiatric Hospital, which was pretty much a village in its own right with on-site houses and shops.

From the classrooms on the eastern side of the school, you could look northeast to the frontage of the main hospital building, which I’ll describe in the next section, or eastward across the hospital lawns to the Ward 7 block, which I’ll cover last.

 

[MarkusCP87]

This took some doing, but here we go…
Stannington Hospital was an extensive site, and I’ll break it down into sections:

Overall layout:
The hospital site is accessed from Bet’s Lane, a B-road running North-to-South. Bet’s Lane forms the western edge of the site.
Access is via the Drive, which runs northeast to southwest across the site, dividing it in two.
The eastern end of the Drive is its junction with Bet’s Lane – the western end terminates at Whitehouse Farm
The area north of the drive is a triangle: it’s long edge runs along the drive, it’s short edge along Bet’s Lane, and it’s point is at the gate of Whitehouse Farm.
The area south of the drive is much larger, and I’ll divide it up into sections when I get to it.
It is, unfortunately, the most heavily redeveloped so much of what I describe south of the drive may now be entirely covered under new build housing.
The area north of the drive is reasonably flat, but once you cross the drive the ground slopes away quite steeply to the south.

North of the Drive:
Entering the Drive from Bet’s Lane and looking north, to your left, the first buildings you’d pass were four long, single-storey rectangular red-brick buildings, in two rows, oriented E-W.
These buildings predated the site’s use even as a sanatorium and we were told they dated from WW2, when the site had housed Italian POWs. I have no confirmation of that.
The northernmost row of two buildings were beyond the boundary of the hospital proper, and within the ‘Christmas tree plantation’ north of the site. Because of this, they may be a good bet to still remain intact.
Little fingers and simple window latches afforded entry to both of these buildings – there was nothing inside except military-style canvas cot beds which parted like tissue paper when we tried to lie on them, and wooden pigeon-hole type storage units with chicken-wire doors. Better fun was had by climbing on the roofs, level with the tops of the conifers, and watching finches wrestle with the fir cones.

The southern row of two buildings, nearer the drive, were used as classrooms by the on-site Hospital School.
The eastern one was for typing, with about twenty massive clunky manual typewriters on desks. (Yeah, that’s right… CSE typing, grade 4. Got mad skillz, yo.)
Moving along the drive, the western classroom building was set up with woodwork machinery and also contained a broken-down Ford Anglia used for car maintenance classes.

Between that classroom and the drive stood a large, red-brick concert hall. It was empty and disused, but stood open and unlocked and we were freely allowed to use it for indoor football. (At that time, nobody had thought of combining the words ‘health’ and ‘safety’ in the same phrase.)

Moving west along the drive, the next building you’d see on your left would be the boiler house Dave explored. We never got to do more than hover round the fringes here because it was always staffed.

North of the boiler house is the spectacular water tower Tez climbed. Climbing it was expressly forbidden and frequently done. The problem was that it’s a long damn climb. When the site was a working hospital, it was evens that somebody would catch sight of you mid-climb, and you’d get chewed out for it. “COME DOWN.” “I am coming down. You’re watching me come down.” “THAT’S ENOUGH OF YOUR CHEEK YOUNG MAN.” Totally worth it, the view is amazing.

Between the water tower and the rectangular brick buildings was a water tank for the site’s fire hoses. It was a grim, square concrete pit full of green-scummed water, surrounded by heavily overgrown steel security fencing.

Southwest of the boiler house and fronting onto the drive, was a fire station. This was a single-storey red-brick building, basically a double garage which housed a van with ladders and buckets, and the hospital minibus.

Continuing along the drive, next to the fire station was a wooden chalet-style building used as a play school for the younger children.

In a field behind that chalet, to the west of the water tower stood a disused and dilapidated wooden cricket pavilion. The ‘cricket pitch’ it stood in was not maintained and was basically just meadow.

The last building north of the drive before the road entered the farm was a large, (maybe four-storey?) Georgian red-brick Nurse’s Home.
This accommodation had been built when the hospital was a busy sanatorium and by 1980 was hugely disproportionate to the number of staff still employed there.
As it was only a very few staff wanted to live in a corridor bedroom in a largely deserted building in the back of beyond, so they had the run of the place.

That’s the extent of the site north of the drive circa 1980 – I’m confident of the layout and don’t believe I’ve missed anything.
Hopefully I’ll get a chance this afternoon to describe the first of the southern sections.

(Mods: if I've 'crossed the streams' here and turned this into a 'hospital sites' thread, please amend as you see fit.)

Absolute fantastic write up, always good to know more about the history.

 

[Norman D Landings]

Main Hospital Building and outbuildings:

Stannington Hospital’s main building was a two-storey rectangular block running E-W along the south side of the drive.
Its frontage faced south over the lawns, and its back was towards the road.
It was set back perhaps 30m from the roadside and the space between the road and the back of the main building was filled with a cluster of single-storey redbrick outbuildings which included a former X-ray block, maintenance storage buildings, the kitchens, and a leisure centre with table tennis, pool table, a pinball machine, and light & sound system for discos. With its heavy walls and lead screens, the former X-ray block was home to the hospital radio station. I helped out there and explored the old block with its massive archaic x-ray equipment. Also among this jumble of buildings was a valve access room for the hospitals hot water system. This building was notable because it was basically Grand Central Station for the feral cats which were endemic across the site. The cats followed the hot water pipes under many of the buildings, and this doorless valve access room was their main entry and exit point. You could look in and see the pipes disappearing into the darkness. There was plenty of crawlspace around the pipes to follow and they presumably lead all over the site, but the eye-stinging stench of cat piss and the scrawny, glinting-eyed forms hissing from between the pipes dissuaded anyone from venturing in. Occasionally, in the dead of night you could hear a faint, plaintive yowling under the floorboards of the wards. There was a persistent ghost story about unwanted babies buried beneath the wards, but it was pretty obvious what had given rise to that story. Having said that – hearing it for the first time was a test of bladder control until you realised it was just cats. Probably.
The frontage of the building was largely unaltered from the site’s sanatorium days – early photographs show large chimneys which were no longer there by 1980, and a glass Solarium on the lawn which was long gone. The western end of the ground floor level housed doctor’s offices and a lovely wood-panelled chapel. The eastern end of the ground floor was taken up by a dining hall. Incongruously, the dining hall had a mortuary room at its eastern end. We would stand on a chair to peer with morbid curiosity through the fanlight into the little room which housed a narrow bed and had a plain wooden cross on its wall. The room had a door which opened into the car park so I assume its location was chosen for ease of access rather than any reflection on the catering.
The first floor of the main block housed the girl’s wards, ward 2 & 3. They were the classic Nightingale ward layout, designed so that one staff member could visually monitor the whole ward from a nurse’s station at one end.


Ward 7 Block:

Home to the rosy-cheeked young Norman! Ward 7a (junior school-age boys) and 7b (Secondary school age boys) were a self-contained block running N-S down the eastern edge of the site. The block was single storey but the slope of the ground meant that the southern end of 7b was effectively at first floor level. The ward had an underfloor cellar entrance (simply an open brick arch at the end of the building) . The underfloor area had ample room to stand at this end of the building, and narrowed to a crawlspace as you went further up the block. The wards themselves were remnants of the sanatorium days, with open verandas at the front and glass-covered verandas at the rear. The interiors were Nightingale layout, one big open dormitory with a row of beds down each side.
At the rear of this block was a small defunct boiler house still containing the old machinery. Predictably, it stood open. Thinking back, you’d have thought there was a door shortage in the early 1980’s.

There were three structures at this end of the site which bear a mention:
First, in the dense woods behind Ward 7 was a large, western-style stockade fort complete with interior stairs and firestep. The nameplate above the gate read ‘Fort Thompson' (after Hospital School headmaster and later local Mayor Derek Thompson). These woods were home to a huge and very noisy rookery.
At the southern fenceline of the site was a sadly run-down sunken pond. it's stonework had obviously once been very elegant. It boasted a thriving population of frogs.
Lastly, over the fence at the south-east corner of the hospital site in the adjoining farm field were the ruins of a WW2-era concrete bunker. It was largely subsumed by turf and was in the process of becoming more hill than building.

There you have it - that’s the extent of the site and its structures circa 1980.
I did find this resource, from the Northumberland county archives, which gives an interactive tour of the hospital site in its Sanatorium days:
https://northumberlandarchives.com/exhibitions/stannington/tour/index.html
It shows some differences in layout to my time there, but I hope my description has been clear enough to make them obvious.