NHER 63799 (Building record) - Hellesdon Hospital

Hellesdon Hospital first opened as a County Lunatic Asylum in 1880. It replaced the Borough Lunatic Asylum at St Augustine's (NHER 48966), which by this time was recognised as providing inadequate accommodation for its inmates (and was closed and demolished soon after the County Asylum became operational).
The main red brick building was designed by Richard Makilwaine Phipson (a former diocesan architect for Norwich and County Surveyor) and had a capacity of 350 inmates. It comprised three blocks for each sex, separated by a combined administration block and superintendent's residence, steward's stores and recreation hall. Workshops, a laundry with boiler house, a water tower and a mortuary block were all also part of the original complex, as well as a lodge building at its gated main entrance. The male and female blocks had both been extended by the end of the 1920s.
The asylum was turned over to military use during World War One and its patients did not return until 1919. Soon after it became the Norwich Mental Hospital. Additional facilities became available in 1937 with the opening of the David Rice Hospital in Drayton (named after a superintendent at Hellesdon). During World War Two the hospital again had to adapt to a war use with some of its beds being turned over to the Emergency Medical Service and not handed back until 1947.
Information from (S1), which also has a range of both exterior and interior photographs. See also (S2).
See NHER 54480 for details of World War Two air raid shelters in the grounds of Hellesdon Hospital.
P. Watkins (HES), 27 February 2020.