Unlocking the asylum: North Wales Hospital archive 1848-1995

The project aims to encourage research in the historic archive of the North Wales Hospital. The objectives are to catalogue, list and package the archive, to promote it as an important academic resource and to explain the hospital’s history to the wider public. The hospital was the main institution in North Wales for the care of people with mental illness for almost 150 years. The completion of the project will see: an itemised catalogue of the existing accessions and an itemised catalogue of later accessions of administration records. Patient case files will be listed and repackaged. The collection will be assessed for conservation needs and preventive preservation measures highlighted and put in place. It will also be assessed for potential digitisation projects and digital resources.

We will make the North Wales Hospital collection accessible to the wider community, providing an invaluable resource to academia while making the publicly available material more accessible to the general user.