On location at St Mary's Asylum

My second brief this year at college was simply titled "Incident Room". This was totally open to our own interpretation, the only guide lines we had were it had to be on location within a room, and an incident had to be involved or hinted at. I started to think about locations with others in my group, and we all quickly realised we all wanted to use an abandoned hospital, or even better, an asylum. I decided that I was going to shoot a young lady as if she was a patient at the asylum when it was open. I chose the incident to be her trapped in a nightmare within her own reality.

We initially wanted to use St George's in Morpeth, but unfortunately upon arrival it was closed off due to asbestos, so we headed to our second choice; St Mary's in Stannington.

We used a Sat Nav to show us the way, and soon realised we'd be doing a good deal of walking when we reached our destination. We began walking up a very muddy pathway and ended up at a building site. Half of the asylum had been torn down, but there were two buildings left standing, one boarded up, and the other with no doors or windows. We crawled through trees, bushes and thorns around the building site and found that we could gain access without climbing a fence or breaking in, which was obviously a relief. We went back to gather out equipment, and started back along the path.

The inside of the building had been stripped to the bare walls, all that was left was a Butane canister in one room (which we decided would be our location) which was a little worrying. We set up our shoot and got to work. The final images we produced were fantastic, mine can be found at facebook.com/dannyrowlandphotography.

Below are some of the behind the scenes images I snapped on my mobile phone whilst I was exploring the building.