About Us
Glenside Hospital Museum is an Accredited Museum, award-winning charity and community asset, managed and run by volunteers.
History of the Museum
The museum was founded by Dr Donal Early, a consultant psychiatrist at Glenside Hospital. Objects and documents were collected and saved, from all corners of the building and beyond, and first displayed on the balcony in the dining room of the hospital in 1984.
When the hospital closed in 1994, use of the derelict chapel was given to the museum on a peppercorn lease which continues today from the University of the West of England. Volunteers set to work scrubbing floors, removing boards from windows, and placing exhibits on pews. In 1997, when Stoke Park Hospitals for learning disabilities closed, members of staff and volunteers brought items to add to the collection.
In 2009, following lead being stolen from the roof, the museum was closed. With the help of a team of volunteers, Luke Pomeroy, a young volunteer, redesigned and rebuilt the layout of the museum. It reopened in 2010, and in 2016 became an ACE Accredited Museum (2347). It continues, with the help of many volunteers, to develop glimpses of the history of hospital care using its unique collection.
Our partners and projects
A Heritage Lottery Fund grant in 2011 enabled over 60 interviews with people who lived and worked at Glenside Hospital to be collected, giving many perspectives. The museum continues to collect memories from anyone that worked or stayed at the hospitals.
In 2013, the museum gained a grant from Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund to explore and exhibit the period 1915–1919 when the hospital was requisitioned by the War Office and became Beaufort War Hospital. It was made famous by the artist Stanley Spencer, who as a young man was an orderly there and painted pictures of the hospital for the Sandham Memorial.
With support from Arts Council England, the museum gained Full Museum Accreditation in 2016. A further Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund grant, and Association of Independent Museums funding through the Pilgrims Trust between 2016-19, enabled a project to conserve and tour 15 unique drawings in our collection by artist Denis Reed (RA, RWA) a patient at Bristol Mental Hospital in the 1950s, alongside drawing workshops supported by Bristol City Council’s Imagination fund.
Widening access to the collection, and including a more diverse range of stories, has continued to characterise museum activity. This includes the work of learning disability curators, funded by a Quartet grant (2017-19), and a partnership with Outside In where 10 artists responded to the museum’s collections, supported by NLHF, John Ellerman Foundation, and the Art Fund, culminating in Looking to the Light (2020-23).
A Royal Society grant (2022-24) linked neuroscience discoveries to the displays to engage young people in the importance of sleep, and a grant from Heritage England (2022-24) enabled the collection of oral histories of Commonwealth nurses who worked in the NHS, resulting in Answering the Call, amongst many other partnerships and projects!
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