Abandoned UK Asylum

By Mark McConville

SPOOKY images and video footage have revealed the crumbling remains of an abandoned UK asylum that once housed 1,500 patients.

The eerie pictures and video show the large halls once used as dorms, rickety staircases and long dark corridors.

Stunning footage taken on a drone shows an incredible aerial view of the vast grounds and buildings of the hospital site.

The haunting shots were taken at Denbigh Asylum in Wales by English filmmaking student Lee Rielly (21) from Cockermouth, Cumbria.

“I had been doing urban exploring videos and photographs for around four months at when I decided to head to Denbigh,” he said.

“I had heard many good things about this beautiful building and how I needed to see it before it comes crumbling to the ground.

“I try to capture the history and emotion of each place that I go to. I like to show the decay of a building which was once filled with life and how it has just been forgotten.”

Denbigh Asylum, also known as North Wales Hospital, was designed by architect Thomas Fulljames to originally accommodate between sixty and two hundred patients.

The hospital opened in 1848 and was planned for closure by Enoch Powell in the 1960s although it didn’t start closing until 1991 when it closed in sections until 1995.

The asylum once housed former Welsh MP George Maitland Lloyd Davies who took his own life there in 1949.

“I love that it is a window into the past, I get to see a place which was once buzzing with people; someone’s home or workplace,” said Lee.

“And now the buildings just sit there letting nature take over. It’s sad in some ways but I feel proud to be one of the few people to see the places in their current state.”

Lee, who took the shots with Canon 600D and a DJI Phantom 4 drone, wants people to understand true urban explorers are respectful.

“We often get a bad name due to the wrong people getting into these places and causing vandalism and fires but the truth is, urban explorers go into these places to take photographs and see the history,” he said.

“We don’t go in to damage the place, steal anything or be troublemakers. Actual urban explorers go by a certain saying, ‘Take only photographs, leave only footprints’.”