As reported earlier this week, the Georgian buildings which once housed the Retreat mental hospital in York are to be redeveloped into homes.

It won’t quite mark the end of psychiatric treatment on the site. Charity The Retreat will continue to offer some adult neurodevelopmental and psychological therapy services at Heslington Road.

But the main hospital building, which was opened in 1796 by the Society of Friends (Quakers) and closed to inpatients at the end of 2018, will be turned into homes by the PJ Livesey Group, which converted the Terry’s factory.

The Retreat was founded in 1792 by William Tuke and fellow Quakers to champion a more humane way of treating people with mental illnesses.

York Press:

The Retreat in the 1870s. Photo: Explore York Libraries and Archives

Ill treatment of psychiatric patients - including beatings, confinement and ‘underfeeding’ - were commonplace at the time. But it was the death of a Leeds Quaker, Hannah Mills, in appalling conditions in the York Lunatic Asylum (later Bootham Park) which inspired Tuke and his fellow Quakers to set up The Retreat.

Tuke began talking to the Friends about how mental health care could be revolutionised. The York Retreat, which opened in 1796, pioneered new methods of treatment of the mentally ill. “These methods included releasing inmates’ chains and occupational therapy,” according to archivists at Explore York.

The new hospital’s first Head Attendant, George Jepson, believed that all individuals deserved to be treated with gentleness and civility.

That may not seem remarkable to us today - but in it’s time, it really did mark a revolution in the treatment of those with mental illness.