About
Fifty Years of Middle Street Resource Centre: The Hidden Heritage of Wellbeing in the Community
In 2022, the National Lottery Heritage Fund awarded £98,000 to Dr Verusca Calabria at Nottingham Trent University to explore the rich hidden history and heritage of Middle Street Resource Centre, a mental health day centre with a long history of innovation, which celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2022.
The Centre’s users, staff, volunteers and others, including young people, are helping to co-produce the Centre’s hidden history using arts and crafts, oral histories, reminiscence, poetry and visual methods. You can view the project audio-visual exhibition here.
You can download a coproduced booklet that traces the history of Middle Street Resource Centre here.
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The Hidden Memories of Mental Healthcare project
In 2020, the National Heritage Lottery Fund awarded Dr Verusca Calabria at Nottingham Trent University a £10,000 grant to explore and document the heritage of Nottingham mental health provision, including the impact of implementing community care and closing the asylums on all involved. To find out about the impact of this project, download the Hidden Memories evaluation report.
Nottingham has been at the forefront of innovation in mental health care provision since the 1950s onwards, such as the open-door policy at Mapperley hospital in 1952, introduced by by progressive psychiatrist Duncan Macmillan, and the setting up of the first community mental health team in the 1980s in England as part of the transition from asylum to community care. Yet little is known about how the changing provision of mental health care has impacted on the provision of care. The voices of service users, carers and retired staff who witnessed the transition from asylum to community care in the 1990s need to be preserved before their important memories are lost.
A leading British reformist psychiatrist. Duncan Macmillan, last Superintendent of Mapperley hospital, Nottingham (1940-1966).
The origins of this project
The project has arisen from extensive consultation and research carried out by Dr Verusca Calabria at Nottingham Trent University on the experiences of giving and receiving care in the now closed mental hospitals in Nottinghamshire across a period of 50 years. The research focused on the experiences of mental health service users and professionals who gave and received care and witnessed the transition from asylum to community care. The findings from the research challenge the historical position of psychiatric hospitals as institutions solely associated with the misuse of power by providing a re-appraisal of the value of inpatient mental health care. The research demonstrated the paramount importance of the therapeutic environment of the mental hospital and the relationships fostered therein for service users’ recovery. The findings capture the loss of the hospital communities as places of safety and belonging and a loss of heritage from the now closed and/or demolished institutions.
Closure of Mapperley hospital, Evening Post, 5 December 1994.
The project aims and objectives
The project aims to collect the personal testimonies of individuals that witnessed the transition from asylum to community care. We would like to collect personal memorabilia that you may like to share about the social history of Nottingham mental health provision. The findings will help to get a better understanding the changing dimension of care experiences. The testimonies will help to produce a permanent digital exhibition and a specialist report for the Nottingham Mental Health Trust.
These testimonies will help preserve the social history of the Nottingham mental health provision, which is at risk of being lost. The overall objective is to record and reflect on stakeholders’ personal and collective community strengths and concerns in relation to mental wellbeing, promote dialogue and knowledge exchange among communities of interest and the wider public. The knowledge resulting from participants’ testimonies will inform the production of a permanent digital public record of the rich and innovative local history of mental health provision, available via this website. It will also inform a specialist report for the Nottingham Mental Health Trust.
Project partners
Middle Street Resource Centre, Beeston, Nottingham, which combines a core purpose of supporting people coping with mental illness or distress with the provision or facilitation of services and activities which benefit the wider local community. The management of the Centre involves people with lived experience of mental health issues at every level at every level of the organisation.
Rushcliffe Mental Health Carers Group, Nottingham, a support group for mental health carers in Nottingham for the past 25 years.
Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust
The Bonington Gallery, Nottingham
How to get involved
Are you a service user, carer or a former staff member that experienced the transition from asylum to community care in the 1990s? If you have experienced the transition from asylum to community care in Nottingham or have memorabilia that you would like to feature on this website, please contact Dr Verusca Calabria using the contact form.
Please note, due to COVID-19, the oral history interviews are currently being recorded remotely.