The World of Leonardo Morgado

Reading a lettings ad I discover that for £600 pcm one can get a “duplex apartment in a listed building with allocated parking that is fully furnished.”  I look up the word “duplex” in Chambers:

duplex noun (duplexes) N Amer 1 (also duplex apartment) a flat on two floors. 2 (also duplex house) a semi-detached house. adj 1 double; twofold. 2 said of a computer circuit: allowing transmission of signals in both directions simultaneously.

I like the word “duplex”. It makes the mouth form lovely shapes as you utter it. I also like the idea of a parking space being fully furnished but perhaps I have misread this particular lettings ad. However, the purpose of this ramble is not to critique the sales pitch of estate agents but to discuss the building known as Highcroft Hall.

I’ve lived in Erdington for twenty seven years and Highcroft has had a rather strange attraction for me. I first knew it as a “mental hospital” a term that had rather frightening conotations for an eight year old mind.

“Watch her. She’s a looney from Highcroft.”

“You’re a bit strange. Careful or you’ll end up in Highcroft.”

Hearing such comments didn’t give me the best education on the conditions that can affect the human mind but instead of making me weary of the building I was drawn to it.  I was drawn to the Gothic aura it radiated and I was also drawn to the people who occupied it.  I wondered who was there and what made them end up in such a place.

I learnt that the building was first known as the Aston Union Workhouse and began life in around 1866 and the purpose of the building was to house the mad, poor and the lost.  It wasn’t until the formation of the National Health Service that the buildings turned into Highcroft Hall Hospital and its purpose?  To house the mad, poor and the lost.

At around the turn of this our new and shiny 21st Century most of the buildings were left to fall apart but it wasn’t long before property developers saw the chance to make money and converted them into apartments.  I found this reincarnation worrying because I feared that the history of the former residents would be lost and also what kind of person would want to live in the space where people may have experienced the most degrading treatment by others.  Well, for one I would like to but not out of some sense of schadenfreude but out of some romantic notion that somehow by occupying the same physical space I would come to understand and empathise with the suffering of those in the past and that would make me a better person.  That and the fact that it would be a good investment and I would get a good financial return when re-selling.  I have imagined the kind of conversation I would have with an estate agent.

“Good morning.”

“Hello. I’m interested in one of the apartments in Highcroft Hall.”

“Have you any particular specification in mind?”

“Ideally, I want a real sense of the past meshing with the modern.  The Victorian sense of decor combined with a modernist slant.  And I want to hear the ghosts of the past scream as their brains get fried by ECT.”

“I have the ideal property. Is Friday a good day for a viewing?”

“I’m busy seeing a monastry where monks still practice self-flagellation but they video it and upload it to youtube.”

“How about Thursday?”

The hospital still exists.  It has been modernised and humanised but I still occassionally walk by the old site and wonder how a space that was occupied by the deranged and confused is now being occupied by the socially mobile and affluent.