Tooting Bec Asylum - A Forgotten Institution

Tooting Bec Asylum - A Forgotten Institution is a talk at St Leonard's Church on Tuesday 3 November, running from 7:30pm to 9:00pm. It tells the story of the asylum that stood next to Tooting Common from 1903 until 1995, when it was demolished to make way for the Heritage Park Estate.

For its first 45 years, it worked as a psychogeriatric hospital, and after 1948, under the NHS, it began to admit younger patients needing a wider range of mental health support. By the time it closed, thousands of people had lived and worked there, but for a long time there was very little left to remember them by. In 2015, Liz Sayce OBE wrote about the hospital's history and noted that gap, and together with Philip Bradley, chair of the Tooting History Group, she raised interest in the site. The asylum was eventually nominated for a Wandsworth Green Plaque, and the book Tooting Bec Asylum Remembered, by Karen Ellis-Rees and Annie Caulfield, was published around the same time. An ongoing project continues to research and record the experiences of staff and uncover the hidden lives of earlier patients in the archives.

The talk builds the story from those memories, rather than just the dates and the buildings. It's a chance to hear about the people who were actually inside the walls, the staff who worked there, and the patients whose lives might otherwise have stayed in the archives. If you've spent any time around Tooting Bec Gardens, you're standing on ground that used to be part of it, and this is a way to see what was there before the estate went up.

It runs from 7:30pm to 9:00pm at St Leonard's Church, Tooting Bec Gardens, Streatham, SW16 1HS, with tickets by donation.