Report - Cheadle Royal Hospital, Cheadle

[GirlGeekUpNorth]

Another report from earlier this year. Despite this site being small, with high traffic, and nothing much left, I really enjoyed this explore!

History of Cheadle Royal Hospital

Cheadle Royal Hospital, formerly known as the Manchester Royal Lunatic Asylum, was a psychiatric hospital built in 1848 – 1849. As of 2010, the majority of the original site became part of the Priory Group, which offers comprehensive inpatient mental health services. One building, known locally as ‘South House’ has been left abandoned. It is here in South House which we spent one afternoon this month.

Despite extensive research, I have been unable to find out what South House was specifically used for, so if anyone knows, please do let me know!

The Report

We arrived at the hospital through the main gates and drove around the back towards South House. After parking up out of sight, we waited for the coast to be clear and climbed tentatively over the gate. Despite not being a difficult entry, we did have to laugh at the effort we put into our little access adventure, only to find the gate on the other side had been left open, and we could have just walked in from the road…

Nevertheless we began to explore. We knew before arriving at Cheadle Royal Hospital that it was only one building, and we didn’t have high expectations of what we would find. On arrival at South House, I was pleasantly surprised. There’s nothing left on the site, and most of the floors on the upper levels are gone, but I still quite enjoyed just having a look around.

If anyone is new to urban exploring, I would definitely recommend Cheadle Royal Hospital as a great first site to check out. It’s very easy to access, with limited danger (you still need common sense, some of the floors are missing….) and you’ll likely bump into some fellow explorers if you visit on a nice weekend!

You can read more about our visit and see some more images here.

 

[Skeleton Ops]

Cool pics. I've just commented on a related thread about how I used to go in there in the late 90s, it was in much better condition then.

The first picture on your post was what we called the living room. As the roof was still on it was dry and comfortable in there. There were 6 or 7 beds with mattresses, a table, and the fireplace was still fitted. The fire escape door and stairs were still fitted and the window frames were intact apart from a few smashed panes. All the plaster was still on the walls but obviously all the damp has subsequently caused it to fall off.

In answer to your question, we were under the impression south house (I believe it had a different name, there used to be a plaque on the east side of the building) was used as the nurses home. Other sources say it was the asylum, which is obviously far more interesting but incorrect (in my opinion).

I wish I had some pictures, but we're talking 1996-1998 here and there was no way we were incriminating ourselves taking a disposable kodak to the developers!

 

[GirlGeekUpNorth]

That's awesome, thank you for the info, I found it really hard to find evidence of the building's original use online, and I know Asylum sounds cool, so I was skeptical to believe it without some more info