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Your digital radio entertainment station showcasing the best in comedy and drama. With recent favourites from BBC Radio 4.

Book of the Week

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Serialised book readings, featuring works from various genres

Serialised book readings, featuring works of non-fiction, biography, autobiography, travel, diaries, essays, humour and history

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Maggie Steed

Jill Waters

Barbara Taylor

Book of the Week: Barbara Taylor - The Last Asylum: Episode 4

The Last Asylum

Episode 4

Barbara Taylor - The Last Asylum

BBC Radio 4 - Book of the Week, Barbara Taylor - The Last Asylum, Episode 4

Moving story of a historian's four years of madness and recovery in England's last asylum.

Documenting the good and bad history of mental health hospitals, Barbara Taylor finds herself in a hostel. Read by Maggie Steed.

The Last Asylum begins with Barbara Taylor's visit to the innocuously named Princess Park Manor in Friern Barnet, North London - a place of luxury flats and careful landscaping. But this is the former site of one of England's most infamous lunatic asylums, the Middlesex County Pauper Lunatic Aslyum at Colney Hatch. At its peak, this asylum housed nearly 3,000 patients - including, in the late 1980s, Barbara Taylor herself.

Writing about The Last Asylum, Booker prize winner and memoirist, Hilary Mantel said, ''We believe our response to mental illness is more enlightened, kinder and effective than that of the Victorians who built the asylums. Can we be sure? Barbara Taylor challenges complacency, exposes shallow thinking, and points out the flaws and dangers of treatment on the cheap. It is a wise, considered and timely book'.

Darian Leader has described it as 'Superb, Riveting, insightful and relentlessly honest'.


Episode 4:
The history of mental health hospitals is fraught with failures and good intentions. When it was decided to close down the old asylums, the care in the community revolution was already well underway. Barbara finds herself in a hostel.


Reader: Maggie Steed

Abridged and produced by Jill Waters
A Waters Company production for BBC Radio 4

Book of the Week: Barbara Taylor - The Last Asylum

BBC Radio 4

Intelligent speech, the most insightful journalism, the wittiest comedy, the most fascinating features and the most compelling drama and readings anywhere in UK radio.

Barbara Taylor's story of her own breakdown and her recovery in England's last asylum.

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