This project explores the history of St Audry’s Hospital in Melton, which began life as the Suffolk County Asylum in 1832, on the site of an old workhouse. It draws on people’s contemporary experiences to consider how attitudes to mental health have changed.

When St Audry’s closed in 1993, its museum collection and archive went to the Museum of East Anglian Life, Felixstowe Museum and the Suffolk Record Office. This website aims to shed some light on the lives of the many hundreds of people – staff as well as patients – who lived and worked at the hospital. Although we will never be able to tell all of their stories, we hope that by looking at the past we will create a better understanding of mental health today. This website brings together different sources of information about what might otherwise become a hidden history.