Recently took R. to appointment at leisure centre between Willerby and Cottingham, East Riding, this being the site of once De La Pole Mental Hospital. While waiting explored the site and came across the cemetery area for De La Pole, now much overgrown but incorporating a pedestal plaque to the 400 plus patients buried across the site between two dates which I need to confirm on a follow-up visit. One of about three only surviving headstones is to a once Assistant Medical Officer who clearly chose to be buried at this site. The inscription is legible but I need to record on another visit.
Some buildings survive from the days of it being a mental hospital but most dotted around the site are relatively new and seem to be Health Authority headquarters, offices and stores, apart from the Leisure Centre and the Humber Centre which is a ‘medium security mental health unit’. Apparently the Humber Centre figures on the Look North website but, as yet, I cannot find it.
In 1976 the East Yorkshire Local History Soc. published a booklet written by Dr. Bickford, Physician Superintendent, De La Pole Hospital, Willerby, E. Yorks. and entitled The Private Lunatic Asylums of the East Riding (see cover illustration above). Unfortunately with De La Pole hospital having been a local authority institution it does not figure in the detailed text, this mostly being about ‘the trade in lunacy’.