Navigating Netherne: correlating feelings with place

This thesis explores personal interactions with an extensive, village-like Edwardian psychiatric hospital complex, its environs, its history, and its stories. Designed by the age’s preeminent asylum architect, George Thomas Hine (1842-1916), Netherne Hospital (formerly ‘The Surrey County Asylum at Netherne’), was opened in 1909. But as social attitudes and budgets allocated for treating mental illness altered, the hospital was closed, and the site redeveloped for modern housing. This thesis focuses on Netherne to examine how our reactions to, and dialogue with, place may be productively undermined through ‘narrativizing’ aspects of it (reinventing, allegorising, mythologising, its figurative / historical and non-figurative, architectural aspects). In connection with this, I both consider and critique psychogeography (which draws attention to the potential elasticity of a place’s meaning), resistant reading, and debates concerning affect, emotion, and atmosphere.

The feelings we constantly involuntarily attribute to place may be subtle, hard to name, describe, or remember, and when noticed are often only too readily dismissed as unworthy of our attention; ‘background noise’, insignificant creases in the texture of consciousness. Yet such feelings, however evanescent, offer us invaluable clues to the complex relationship we have with place. I argue that this relationship is determined by the dynamic existing between feeling, place, and narrative (I here understand ‘narrative’ to include stories, description, and what usually passes for ‘explanation’).

While every building has its own particular story (i.e. its history, whether prosaic or dramatic) a building may itself also be construed as a story– its architectural features ‘protagonists’, acting with or against each other. Such unhabitual narratives can sway perceptions, galvanise our apprehension of place and even reveal ‘new’ aspects.

Much of the literature discussing the emotional valency of place sets out to show how design is instrumentalised to orchestrate the subject’s responses to place (e.g. by encouraging acquisitiveness in shopping centres, ‘well-being’ in hospitals, etc.) This thesis explores the value of using narrative open-endedly to resist, augment, and transform habitual awareness of place.