Picturing the Asylum
Saturday 24 June, 2.00pm – 4.00pm

Surrey History Centre in partnership with Royal Holloway College, University of London, presents an afternoon of short talks examining the role of photography in the history of Surrey’s mental health hospitals.

2.10pm: 'Using photographs to explore life in Victorian and Edwardian asylums'
Dr Jane Hamlett is a Reader in Modern British History at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is an expert on the history of homes, families and private life and recently led a research project that explored the material world of institutions (including ‘lunatic asylums’) in Victorian and Edwardian England. Her books include Material Relations: Families and Domestic Interiors in England, 1850-1910 (MUP, 2010), At Home in the Institution: Material Life in Asylums, Lodging Houses and Schools in Victorian and Edwardian England (Palgrave, 2015) and Residential Institutions: Inmates and Environments, 1720-1970 (Routledge, 2013).

2.30pm: 'Patient portraits: the camera in Holloway Sanatorium, Surrey, c.1885-1910'
Dr Katherine Rawling is an Associate Fellow in the History of Medicine at the University of Warwick. Her research explores the ways in which photography interacted with medical knowledge and practice, particularly when it became part of the patient-doctor encounter in the second half of the nineteenth century. Additionally she is interested in the camera in Victorian institutions more generally, and the relationship between power, control, agency, and photographic technologies. Her work examines how historians can use photographic and visual sources in their work. Her next project, Photomania will be carried out at the University of Leeds and will examine the connections between nineteenth-century and present-day anxieties over the photographic image and health and well-being.

3.10pm: 'A day in the life of a Surrey asylum: Netherne Hospital c.1960'
Using hundreds of photographs of Netherne psychiatric hospital, Coulsdon, in the 1960s, History Centre Manager, Julian Pooley will take us on a guided tour through wards, day rooms, and workshops and outside into airing courts, orchards and the farm, allowing a precious glimpse inside this large Surrey institution on a typical working day.

Kirstie Arnould, Project Initiator for Keeping us in Mind will also be bringing some oral history and photography materials from the Epsom psychiatric hospital cluster and some Long Grove images.

£5 includes refreshments at Surrey History Centre, 130 Goldsworth Road, Woking, GU21 6ND.

Please book a place online at www.surreycc.gov.uk/heritageevents in person at Surrey History Centre or any Surrey Library or phone 01483 518737.

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