The look like mail pidgeon holes to me.

Thank Goodness I got to the end of this gallery. I googled 'medical illustrations' at 9pm last night and I have been looking at your photos and ALL the comments since. It is now 6.11am (yes, 9 hours later!!) and I MUST get some sleep before the family wakes up.

Lovely to 'meet' you Motts. Your photography is truly a gift from you to us. I am inspired like never before.

Gee Motts, I hope you rang Gordon!! LOL

Jude, exactly. Reminds me of the last surreal building shot. They look like toy model houses. Yet again, I reckon Thomas the tank engine is not far away. (reference to a previous photo).

kommanderK,
These doors look like toilet doors. Maybe they had Male/Female symbols stuck on them. Or Staff/Visitors signs. I don't think they'd have had two patients rooms by their lonesome.

So far, the crosses have been largely guesswork. Surely there's someone out there who knows someone in the construction/demolition biz that could clear it up. In all these picyures, that is the one thing that bugs me the most.

Imagine there are patients in these rooms and you are on duty at night. You're tip-toeing along, in the dark, alone with your flashlight, checking the windows. So far, everyone is sound asleep in their bed.

Then you come to the last room. You shine the flashlight in. the bed is EMPTY!! You press your nose up to the glass peering into the room, then....................AAAAARGH, the patient suddenly springs up from below the window and mashes her face into the glass only inches from yours. Her maniacal laughter tears the silence apart..................wouldn't you just s**t yourself stupid.

Hey Gordon, Take a powder!

The pattern on the wall looks like VEINS.

Maybe those trees would have been pruned down quite a bit, making it much more open and breathable.

29.75 or 29.57 ?

You can tell by the positioning of the little knobs part way up and down, it's the second price.

Check out the laughing Native American Chief on the wall at the top of the stairs.

The "soap dispenser" has what looks like electical tubing coming out of it. I think it's a fluoro stairwell light.

Hey GirlJaye, I think the bolt fitter must been obsessive compulsive. Then again, if I was fitting the rail, I reckon I would line them up too.

Long island Irish See my post re: colours a couple of photos ago.

O.K. last time I saw moths, now I see bats. Anybody else "see" them?

This is so surreal, it looks like a model house. I swear blind Thomas the Tank Engine is going to come chuffing out from between the two buildings.

If you look at this quickly, it looks like hundreds of pale moths crawling around on a wall, esp. the bottom part.

Never mind being freaked out by iron lungs etc, Mott's running the gauntlet between falling through rotten floorboards into a stinking cesspit of stagnant water, catching T.B., or getting whacked by a group of surprised junkies off their faces on god-knows-what !!

Since when did photography become an extreme sport??

Re: the yellow walls.

The colours of the walls in most of Mott's photos always look drab and depressing. But when you think of it, he has shown us photos of green walls, yellow walls, brown walls, white walls, and pink walls. They all looked disheartening. The colour is not the trouble, it is the SHADES of the colours that were depressing.

Although born just inside the fifties, I can remember very well, interior decorating themes of those times. That fifties dull, rose pink, for instance. I still remember a melamine dinner set aaagh! And the scary shade of green bath we had in England.

When colours went psychadelic in the 60's, it's like there was some kind of backlash amongst government decorators as if those vivd lime greens and groovy purples were associated with LSD and drop outs. Nearly all governent buildings of those times were continually painted in drab, uninteresting shades of colour. (even today, things that are made in what I call "government grey" like ECG, and all heart monitor and blood pressure cables, are coloured that way because it is the cheapest colour to make, or so a pt who used to make them told me).

It wasn't really until the 80's and 90's that the bright beautiful colours used in decorating we see today began to be used. If you look in children's hospital corridors today, the colours are almost overwhelming, at least in Oz. (With lots of sun shiny yellow).

After checking out the history site link, I couldn't help wondering what they did with all the patients who were evacuated during the two world wars so the military could use the hospital? Does anybody know?

I agree with Florida Jen, abandoned toy photos are somehow sadder for me than other things. What really gets me is photos of a single, broken doll. There is something 'war-like' about the image.

Tommeh!!, The neat left wall is courtesy of the radiators. Even though they wouldn't be on after everyone left, the whole wall and its interiors would have repelled mould, just that little bit longer.

Any old buildings that are not completely fortressed up could be used by squatters. if Motts got into these places easily, then anybody else could.

And if anybody else could, then someone looking for a 'dead body hiding place' could also get in. So regular patrols would be needed.

I used to be a security guard at a University and abandoned buildings (believe it or not, also a psych hospital attached to the Uni) were regularly checked by different shifts.

This photo reminds me of when Tom Hanks sank down through the floor in 'The Money Pit'

Iv'e washed patients in these recently, except they were metal. They wre adult cerebral palsy patients who were contracted enough in the foetal position to be lifted up like babies.

One would hope there would have been a changing/clothing bench nearby.

Having a crappy lower back and mild scoliosis, I find being stretched by my chiro and physio relaxing and brilliant. Imagine if you were all contracted up with tight, fibrosed muscles and someone stretched your limbs out and maybe ?massaged them as well. Even if it was such a scary looking piece of equipment, I reckon it would be beautiful to stretch.