Wednesday 10 December 2008

Bangour Village Hospital

I had never heard of this amazing place before this week, but on a tip off, we went early on a frosty Sunday morning for Bangour Village Hospital.

Aha! I recognised it. It is the village I could never quite place when driving along the M8, glimpsed through a gap in the trees. Apparently it was also used in recent Hollywood thriller The Jacket.

This place is a former asylum, built a hundred years ago, but was not a hospital in the traditional sense - it was a self-contained village, with power house, shop, church, nurse accomodation, activity block, main hospital building, and a number of substantial residential villas, set out in a clearing on a wooded hillside near Bathgate. The village concept, and the level of psychiatric care, were leading edge for its time.

Villas at the western edge of Bangour Village Hospital:


We wandered round this deserted and boarded up village, impressed with its size. It is not possible to access any of the buildings, but glimpses in some windows show the interiors to still be in good condition. The site was not abandoned completely until in 1990s and the building of a new hospital for the area.

A series of handsome stone villas and flats set in parkland next to Livingston and the M8? It is a prime site for development as a commuter town. Hopefully this site is used again soon, and is not left to decay and 'go on fire' like so many other old buildings in Scotland.

2 comments:

Billy said...

There is a hospital in Tanzania called the Jobbi clinic

Robert Craig said...

That was funny ten years ago.