Back in the day - West Park Hospital
West Park Hospital was a large Asylum in Epsom, part of the Epsom Cluster of 5 psychiatric hospitals. Located in extensive grounds full of deer that would leap out of bushes and scare the absolute shit out of you. I used to explore here with my cousin, i took my husband once before he was ill but he didn’t understand the attraction to urbex.
This hospital was really popular within the urbex community and as you read you can probably see why. It was amazing, you could walk around the whole perimeter and there was always access to outer buildings around the back but finding a way into the main buildings was difficult. The difficulty came from a security guard on site known to everyone in the urbex community as MC Hammer. MC Hammer spent his days wandering around the site patching up any entry points he found with random bits of wood, whenever you came onto the site you could hear him somewhere hammering away. He was also incredibly rude.
One day when we were there he found us in the grounds with my cousins little dog. Urbex Peg the dog didn’t like men and she also absolutely hated anyone in hi-viz. We warned him twice not to touch the dog who was growling at him but he chose to put his hand down to her face and she nipped at him. I’m surprised I wasn’t on first name terms with the miserable sod the amount of times he escorted me off site.
We visited here so many times and usually failed at getting in to anything other than the back buildings which included a day centre and staff quarters but on one of our visits we discovered a bolt missing from the security fence around the side of the main building and we managed to finally get in. What a result.
The buildings consisted of wards set off of long corridors, each slowly decaying, some with floors so dangerous or missing that you couldn’t enter. It was quite daunting seeing numerous isolation cells in the wards and day rooms and walking around you could imagine what the place was like when it was in use and the horrific ways patients were treated not just here but in other asylums. Some of the wards still had patient information sheets stating their state of mind in that day and what activities they had done if any.
Some access to other parts of the main section were inaccessible from inside the maze of corridors when we went so we never got to see the hall or chapel. Both had suffered major fires caused by arson. It was quite eerie in there but we never experienced anything out of the ordinary and never bumped into any other explorers surprisingly.
There was lots of furniture and equipment left behind, these days most hospitals we explore are pretty much empty.
On another of our visits we managed to get into the laundry area, kitchens, the hairdressers and workshops. I was lucky that day as a huge heavy wooden door fell and narrowly missed my head, it probably would have knocked me out cold.
One time just as we were making our way back to the car we spotted a building behind some tree’s which was open, we had found the mortuary. There wasn’t a slab but the body fridges were there and the rooms were full of mummified rats, brain and sample slides and a poor dead cat that Peg decided to roll on.
I loved exploring here, it was local and if you were lucky enough to get in you could spend hours in there. The site was eventually turned into housing and the exteriors of most of the buildings were saved so the estate looks pretty good compared to the abomination that is Cane Hill.
All of my pictures here have been enhanced using ai as the original photos, taken on a Canon PowerShot, were pure blurry bullshit.
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