Remembering to Forget: How the UK Disappeared from the Psychedelic Map

Abstract

Whenever young Frank Crompton accompanied his grand mother on the bus through Worcester, England, in the 1950s, she made him put a bag over his head as the bus drove by Powick Psychiatric Hospital." Don't look that way or you'll get damaged by it," she would say. 1 The stigma of Powick was widespread in the local community.Beryl Kendall, whose mother was institutionalized at Powick, remembers an old saying that if you were naughty, you would be sent there."Horrific, that was," she remembered of the rumors, which added to her stress when she got of the bus in front of the hospital."I never knew what I was going to find." 2 The looming presence of the asylum was enough to give just about anyone pause.When W. V. Caldwell first laid eyes on Powick in the 1960s, he understood why passersby might look the other way.He described the hospital as "gray and dismal, its stones piled upon one another in monumental unimaginative weariness."This American observer interpreted the view as characteristically British: "Tall curtainless win dows stared blankly at us through the first spatter of cold rain.Here were all the schools, orphanages, and prisons of Charlotte Bronte and Dickens wrapped into one.Here was the En glish 'institutions,' bleak and somber." 3 Two local high school students visited in the summer of 1962, noting that the hospital "pre sents rather a grim sight when viewed from Hospital Lane, with its high walls and rectangular win dows."No won der, they wrote, "that those who judge the hospital on this appearance imagine it to be a place of straight-jackets and padded cells."