A former madhouse with a warren of secret passages

Edinburgh Napier’s Craighouse campus can trace its history back as far as the 12th century, with the oldest surviving building on the site, Old Craig, dating back to 1528. Old Craig has attracted a series of notable tenants, including Captain Stephen Bruntsfield, one of Mary Queen of Scots’ attendants- whose ghost is said to still haunt its halls- and William Kinninmond Burton, the pioneering architect who designed Japan’s first skyscraper.

Craighouse is best known, however, for its role as incubator of the modern treatment for mental illness in Scotland. Following the death of his friend, the poet Robert Fergusson at the Edinburgh City Bedlam in 1774, aged just 24, the Lord Advocate Alexander Lockhart, and then-owner of Old Craig began a campaign to have a new mental hospital built on his property. After 40 years of fundraising, which included a petition to parliament for £2000 in assets seized from Jacobite rebels, Lockhart broke ground on a new hospital in 1806.

In terms of conditions for its patients – most of whom were fee-paying tenants – the new institution was hardly better than its predecessor. It was only in 1878, under the stewardship of Dr Thomas Clouston, a University of Edinburgh professor and holder of the world’s first Lectureship in Psychiatry, that truly modern practices began to be adopted at Craighouse. Having travelled the world observing best practice in the treatment of mental illness, Clouston oversaw the construction of New Craig, at the time the largest and most progressive mental hospital in the world.

The Thomas Clouston Clinic was at the forefront of mental health treatment for almost a century until its closure in 1993, due to spiralling maintenance costs. It pioneered the treatment of ‘shell-shock’ following the First World War, and the development of nursing homes in the 1930s. Today, its legacy is preserved through a number of commemorative exhibits as well as in the building’s construction: New Craig features ‘hidden’ staircases and disconnected floors, designed to allow doctors to circulate separately while limiting access to patients’ wards.