Bangour village hospital - mental asylum - Scotland

Bangour Village Hospital was a psychiatric hospital located west of Dechmont in West Lothian, Scotland.

The hospital had only been in use for a decade when it was overtaken by world events. In 1915 it was requisitioned for military use, and with the addition of temporary accommodation marquees was housing over 3,000 wounded servicemen by 1918: meanwhile the mentally ill patients were displaced to asylums around Scotland. Bangour Village Hospital reopened as a mental hospital in 1922 and it was to mark its reopening and to serve as a war memorial that the Village Church was commissioned. 1939 saw the use change again, when Bangour became the Edinburgh War Hospital. This time its capacity was increased by the building of a large annex on a site to the north west. After the war the annex became Bangour General Hospital, offering general medical services across West Lothian, while Bangour Village Hospital again reverted to use as a mental hospital.

Bangour General Hospital was run down and closed (and subsequently demolished) following the opening of St John's Hospital in nearby Livingston in 1989. Meanwhile the wider approach to mental health was changing, with advances in medication and an increasing emphasis on "care in the community" leading to the run down and closure of many traditional mental hospitals. This process ran its course at Bangour through the 1990s and into the early years of the current century, and the last patients left the hospital in 2004, almost exactly a century after the first arrived. The following year the site was used as the location for the film "The Jacket", starring Keira Knightley and Adrian Brody. Since then it has been in the news as the subject of planning interest for development as housing, incorporating all the listed buildings on the site, and as a location for police riot training.