Stanley Royd Asylum Chapel

[Rochester]

Saint Faith's in Hospital

One of the more unusual churches dedicated to the patron saint was the chapel of Stanley Royd Hospital in Wakefield, which previously rejoiced in the name of the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum: the name inscribed on the church silver. It has been closed for some years now, and abandoned, but it was, according to a history of the institution, a place of refuge and peace, big, but never frightening or impersonal.


Patients came down there from the wards, into a church with two lofty naves and no transepts. The organ was at the end of one nave and at the other a magnificent stained-glass window, picturing members of various hospital professions with patients. Beneath it, a real patient had painted an unforgettable Last Supper, with the thirteen figures all bearing the same haunted face.

Social segregation was built into the architecture of this St Faith’s. The arches separating the twin naves strictly separated male patients and staff from female ones. In later years, all this changed, and the far smaller congregation used only part of one nave. But to the end, as the chaplain relates, ‘the church never changed, so that all the time, at every service, you would be conscious of the special role of this particular church – to be a focal point for the hospital’s purpose of caring and healing. It is abandoned now. Then it was the heart of the asylum.'




















The stained glass window described.