Broadmoor: It’s A Good Home Ain’t It?

Organised in collaboration with the Association for Psychosocial Studies, https://www.psychosocial-studies-association.org

Memory, Rebecca Solnit suggests, is ‘unimaginable without physical dimensions,’ since ‘to imagine it as a physical space is to make it into a landscape in which its contents are located, and what has location can be approached.’ I am currently writing a memoir centred on the experiences of a family member who was detained in high-secure psychiatric institutions (Broadmoor, Ashworth and Rampton) between 1972-2002 and whom I visited throughout my childhood. As part of my investigations into our respective memoires and experiences of these institutions, my uncle and I have been journeying back to these places, finding and viewing photographs, building plans, and maps.
This paper will present a series of short creative writing fragments reflecting on the physical dimensions of Broadmoor and exploring the different ways carceral power may be exerted, reproduced, and contested through them. The imposing Victorian gate, red brick walls and turret clock, have for decades served as the media’s favoured images of Broadmoor - long after those buildings were decommissioned. This work is interested in what happened in the direct encounters of inmates and their visitors with these symbolic places and how approaching the locations kept behind the walls, might illuminate something of the hidden history of Broadmoor’s populations – from the once expansive gardens where friendships between inmates were tended; to the admission block roof where a red flag was once raised in protest at patient abuse.

This event is also accessible online via Zoom, https://gold-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/93908473775
Meeting ID: 939 0847 3775

Bio: Hannah Dee is a writer and union organiser who has been active in various justice and anti-state violence campaigns. She is currently undertaking her PhD at QMUL’s School of English and Drama.

Dates & times

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2 Feb 2023	5:00pm - 7:00pm	apple google outlook

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