Broken Chair

The Brecon and Radnor Joint Counties Lunatic Asylum, as it was originally known, opened in 1903 and closed in 1999. It served as a mental hospital, a war hospital, and a college, but it is now completely derelict. When I visited in 2008 it looked as though a hurricane had blown through it just the day before, but it was still full of echoes of older times.

Going Nowhere

The wheelchair in the passageway is a poignant reminder of what life might have been like for an inmate. It sits in a crossway between doors and windows, but immobile as if the greater outside world was accessible to the eyes and ears but beyond reach of limb and body. Patients were locked in by the building as securely as they were locked in by their senses.