Inside Broadmoor

Inside Broadmoor



Peter Sutcliffe is held there. So is Ian Brady. But can anything be done to treat the criminally insane? Katherine Faulkner is given a tour of the hospital

Getting into Broadmoor is almost as difficult as getting out. It's not just the mobile, tape recorder and camera that have to go. Watches, phone cards, sticky tape and Tic Tacs are off limits too. On the second of two full-body searches, a security guard discovers a tiny plastic sachet containing a spare button still attached to the inside of my new shirt. "No plastic bags," she barks, confiscating it.

Passing out of the gauntlet of security and into the hospital courtyard, there is an eerie silence, disturbed only by quiet footfalls on gravel and the vague clink of security gates. The towering, wire-topped fences that loom in every direction around the leafy grounds belie the hospital's apparent pleasantness. The Moors Murderer, Ian Brady, the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe, and the East End gangster Reggie Kray have all been guests inside these walls.

Beyond the courtyard is the redbrick arch of the entrance to the old lunatic asylum. Broadmoor opened in 1863, in the Berkshire village of Crowthorne, as the country's first purpose-made home for the criminally insane. Its hanging clock must once have had a foreboding aspect for hapless "lunatics" offloaded underneath it from horse-drawn ambulances, unlikely to ever again see the outside world. Today, it looks toy-like, almost comical, dwarfed by the colossal, snaking walls that shield it, along with a jumble of newer buildings, from the outside world.