History
The now derelict Bangour Village Hospital is a large Psychiatric Hospital complex which first opened in 1906 as The Edinburgh District Asylum with an initial 200 patients. The Asylum which was modelled on a German village-plan design similar to that of the Alt-Scherbitz asylum of the 1870s. In 1918 when the Asylum has around 3000 patients it was renamed as Bangour Village Hospital and operated under this name until its closure in 2004.
As with many other hospitals Bangour was requisitioned during both World War I and World War II and held the temporary names of “The Edinburgh War Hospital” and “The Scottish Emergency Medical Hospital”. Both in the interim years between the wars and after 1945 the Hospital continued to function as a psychiatric facility.
A gradual phased closure of the Hospital began in 1989 with the closure of Bangour General Hospital (now Demolished) and the opening of the nearby St John’s Hospital. The last remaining wards closed in 2004.
Since its closure, the Bangour Village Hospital was used as a location for the filming of The Jacket starring Adrian Brody & Keira Knightly. In 2009 The grounds were also used as a location for a counter-terrorist exercise named “Exercise Green Gate” which was a large scale training set up with 400 emergency services staff and 250 volunteer casualty actors. The activity was intended to prepare staff for chemical, biological or nuclear attack.
Our Visit
Visited with Baron Scotland and Lowri, I’d always wanted to take a look around this place and was pleasantly surprised at by how vast the site was… the villas just seem to go on forever as you walk around the grounds which are frequented by local dog walkers. We managed to get access to 2 buildings the main recreation hall which was one of the original buildings and the church which was added in 1929 and was in surprisingly good condition with only some relatively minor water damage to one gable wall.
Most of the other buildings seemed to be very heavily boarded and in worsening conditions. I don’t imagine there would be a great deal else to see but I wouldn’t mind a look around the nurses block at some point. It’s certainly one of the more attractive buildings externally.
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