"It was just another world" Highvolume Play Pause Stop

 

A view of the Royal Albert Hospital taken looking west. This was likely to be in the 1950s. Plenty of detail to appreciate. This includes a cricket match, the gardens and the terraced housing in the foreground is Dorrington Road, just across the rail tracks from the institution.

Frank Lord

 

This is a view of the Royal Albert, looking south-south east. The photograph was taken from what is now (2020) the site of the Haverbreaks housing estate on the southerly edge of Lancaster.  Written on the back of the photograph: '1. Royal Albert Institution'. It was only after January 20th 1910 that the institution was called this name. For many years before then it had always been called the Royal Albert Asylum. It is likely this image dates back to the 1910s. 

Lancashire County Museums Service

 

Malcom Alston in his office at the Royal Albert - probably in the 1980s.

Malcolm Alston

Malcolm Alston, a former Charge Nurse at the Royal Albert Hospital, recalls growing up near to the institution in the 1940s and 50s. As he put it, he lived in the “shadow” of the Albert. In the family home on Haverbreaks Estate, Lancaster, a resident from the institution used to do their garden. When Malcolm came to work at the institution in the mid-1960s he recalled that it was “a completely new world for me”.

As a child, for him, the Royal Albert:

“It was just another world. Something behind a wall… that we didn’t know anything about… I wasn’t – as a young lad – I wasn’t even curious about it. It was a place that we used to walk around on the way to Scotforth School and that was it.”

(Recorded Interview – September 12^th 2005)

On the colour aerial photograph, towards the top of the picture, just beyond the hospital site is a cluster of houses, which is Haverbreaks Estate. This is where Malcolm lived as a young boy in the 1940s and 50s, so at roughly the same time that this photo was taken. The black and white one, although much earlier than Malcolm’s childhood, may have been similar to the view he had from his home.