FORGOTTEN MANCHESTER: Piccadilly Gardens used to be home to a huge ‘lunatic asylum’

Manchester’s Piccadilly Gardens have long been well-renowned across the country – though perhaps not for the most complimentary of reasons. 

These days, the area is recognised for its ongoing issue with Spice, homelessness and anti-social behaviour and, sadly, its vast history fares no better.

Hundreds of years before the infamous ‘Berlin Wall’ was built and before it became the drug hotspot of Manchester, the UK’s first ever ‘lunatic asylum’, which adjoined the Manchester Royal Infirmary, was located there.

Back in the 1700s, the MRI had already been treating a number of mentally unwell patients but, thanks to laws in place at the time, they were barred from admission as in-patients. So, out of concern for the abuse that was known to take place in private mental institutions at the time, a new hospital for these particular patients was built.

manchesterhistory.net

‘The Manchester Lunatic Hospital’ – as it was officially named – opened its doors in 1766 and immediately began accepting its first patients. The eighty-bed institution was known for treating its patients remarkably well for its time, with no reported instances of beatings or questionable restraint methods.

Historian Michala Hulme noted of the hospital: “The Manchester Lunatic Hospital tended to treat their patients better than other mental hospitals. They did not agree to any ill treatment of their patients.”

In 1773, the trustees passed a resolution stating that there would be ‘no stripes or beatings. No painful coercion whatsoever, more than what is necessary to restrain them from hurting themselves or others.’

However, there was something a little less ethical happening outside of the MRI’s walls – the formidable ‘daub holes.’

Piccadilly’s daub holes – wet pits and ponds used for clay extraction – were used for the act of ‘ducking’, a very public punishment reserved for the most unruly and troublesome of women. Their ‘crimes’ could be vary from ‘scolding’ – being quarrelsome or noisy – to not behaving as a dutiful maid or wife was expected to behave, to having a child out of wedlock or working as a prostitute.

Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives

As for the punishment itself – the accused women would be dragged through Manchester’s streets to the infamous daub hole, where they would then be strapped to a chair attached to the end of a long wooden pole. Then, they would be lowered into the filthy water below.

Michala said on the ritual: “Religion was key. Ducking was thought to wash away their sins. It was very easy to be accused of being a prostitute or a witch during this period.

“Any woman who was a bit strange or anything that couldn’t be explained was called witchcraft. They would stick these women on the ducking chair and dunk them until their sins were washed away. People at this time were used to public hangings and the duckings would have been a big spectacle.”

Thankfully, the barbaric act of ducking would die out in the coming years, and The Manchester Lunatic Hospital continued to grow and, almost seventy-five years later, the trustees noted that the original founders of the hospital were ‘quite in unison with the mild, merciful and enlightened measures now adopted by the medical practitioners in our modern lunatic hospitals.’

Welcome Collection Gallery

Yet as the mid-nineteenth century arrived, Victorian Manchester was growing rapidly and the Piccadilly area had become overcrowded and noisy – not the most ideal environment for those being treated for and recovering from mental illnesses. 

So in 1845 the trustees bought a site in Cheadle, Stockport and moved the hospital there four years later. It was renamed The Manchester Royal Hospital for the Insane and continued its ‘mild, merciful and enlightened’ approach with patients, something which Michala praised as ‘groundbreaking.’

She said: “The treatments they were using were way ahead of their time. Treatments in other mental hospitals at the time were brutal but the committee pledged that they would do nothing that caused harm to any of their patients.

“At the time mental health and depression wasn’t really understood. You could be locked up for mental illness.”

Today, The Manchester Royal Hospital is known as Cheadle Royal Hospital.