The Royal India Asylum was a

lunatic asylum The lunatic asylum (or insane asylum) was an early precursor of the modern psychiatric hospital. The fall of the lunatic asylum and its eventual replacement by modern psychiatric hospitals explains the rise of organized, institutional psychiatry ...

operated by the

Secretary of State for India His (or Her) Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for India, known for short as the India Secretary or the Indian Secretary, was the British Cabinet minister and the political head of the India Office responsible for the governance of th ...

Hanwell Hanwell () is a town in the London Borough of Ealing, in the historic County of Middlesex, England. It is about 1.5 miles west of Ealing Broadway and had a population of 28,768 as of 2011. It is the westernmost location of the London post t ...

between 1870 and 1892. The asylum occupied Elm Grove House in Church Road, Hanwell, a large property standing in extensive grounds which had first been turned into an asylum by Susan Wood. Her husband was the brother of the wife of William Ellis, the first superintendent of the Hanwell Asylum.Andrew Robert
The Lunacy Commission
(1981

Middlesex University web, accessed 11 September 2008. In March 1870, the Secretary of State for India bought the Elm Grove House estate from the Perceval family for £24,500.

Sir Matthew Digby Wyatt Sir Matthew Digby Wyatt (28 July 1820 – 21 May 1877) was a British architect and art historian who became Secretary of the Great Exhibition, Surveyor of the East India Company and the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cam ...

then oversaw the conversion of the property into a lunatic asylum for patients sent home from

British India The provinces of India, earlier presidencies of British India and still earlier, presidency towns, were the administrative divisions of British governance on the Indian subcontinent. Collectively, they have been called British India. In one ...

. The new Royal Indian Asylum opened in August 1870, Margaret Makepeace, Lead Curator, East India Company Records
“The Royal Indian Asylum and the building of the railway at Ealing”
9 January 2013. CC-BY icon

Text was copied from this source, which is available under
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 7: Acton, Chiswick, Ealing and Brentford, West Twyford, Willesden (1982)
Ealing and Brentford: Public services
Pages 147–149, accessed 11 September 2008 taking in patients previously looked after in the

East India Company The East India Company (EIC) was an English, and later British, joint-stock company founded in 1600 and dissolved in 1874. It was formed to trade in the Indian Ocean region, initially with the East Indies (the Indian subcontinent and Southea ...

’s Asylum at Pembroke House, London. One such was Captain

John Dibbs Captain John Dibbs (8 November 1790–1872) was a master mariner prominent during 1822–1835 in the seas around the colony of New South Wales, New Zealand and the Society Islands (now part of Tahiti). Dibbs was master of the colonial schooner ...

(1790–1872). In 1874 the

India Office The India Office was a British government department established in London in 1858 to oversee the administration, through a Viceroy and other officials, of the Provinces of India. These territories comprised most of the modern-day nations of I ...

was given notice that the proposed Hounslow and Metropolitan Railway was to run through the grounds of the Asylum. An Act to give effect to this was enacted in 1878, with provisions to protect the interests of the Royal Indian Asylum: a

compulsory purchase Compulsion may refer to: * Compulsive behavior, a psychological condition in which a person does a behavior compulsively, having an overwhelming feeling that they must do so. * Obsessive–compulsive disorder, a mental disorder characterized by i ...

was limited to no more than two acres, unless the Secretary of State consented; the railway would go through the grounds in cutting; a bridge and road over the cutting were to be built and maintained; and the railway was to be fenced off. Negotiations between the India Office and the railway centred on the price to be paid for the land, the position of the bridge, and the fencing. Dr Thomas Christie, the Superintendent of the Asylum, was consulted about the protection to be given to patients, and it was agreed that an iron railing would serve the purpose and look better than the high brick wall planned by the railway company. Christie believed that patients were less likely to climb an open railing than a wall they could not see over. Bars should be vertical, except at the top and bottom, to discourage climbing. The land was conveyed in 1881. The asylum closed in 1892.

Notes

{{coord missing, United Kingdom Former psychiatric hospitals in England