Atkinson Morley - Wimbledon - April 2010

Atkinson Morley closed in about 2003 and has always been on the "shopping list". Most of the older reports on this place made it look quite interesting, with loads of hospital detritus still scattered about. Sadly, when we went it had been pretty well stripped out and fairly heavily vandalised. Oh well, that's what you get if you leave things too late. After a lot of searching we did finally find our main target, the old MRI scanner, one of the first in the world apparently. We spent a while photographing this and then had a look around the main hospital and water tower before leaving. I later found out there are two scanners there, the second one we didn't find. My exploring buddy remarked as we left how the place "had no colour". I agreed and later began to realise that the whole hospital exploring thing for me was more our less dead. I don't think any explorer really needs to see more than about five or six to realise that they all look pretty much the same. Still, having said that, with the demolition of practically half the hospitals I've explored now complete, I'm glad I visited them when I had the chance. In fact, the whole "retro hospital" scene in the South East is now pretty much dead.

All the wards looked a lot like this.

The scanner was the best part.

Scanner console.

Waiting room.

Roof.

Also worth a read is this article about frontal lobotomies.