Fair Mile Hospital today

We’re grateful to Bettina Kirkham of the Berkshire Gardens Trust for providing a report and photos of a place designed by Marnock in the early 1870s - especially as the site these days is just over the county boundary in Oxfordshire!

The Lunatic Asylum for Berkshire, Reading and Newbury was designed by architect Charles Henry Howell in a Tudor Gothic style and built in 1868-70. The 65-acre grounds were designed by Marnock as a mixture of ‘airing courts’ (secure outdoor spaces for patients to exercise), gardens, pleasure grounds, kitchen gardens, orchards and paddocks. As part of their treatment, patients were involved in construction and horticultural work.

Fair Mile (Moulsford) Hospital, from an Ordnance Survey map of 1900, reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland.

Known as Fair Mile Hospital since the 1940s, the both the buildings and grounds are on the National Heritage List at Grade II.

The hospital closed in 2003 and the buildings have since been converted into a housing estate of several hundred private homes, known as Cholsey Meadows.

Bettina reports from her visit in June 2023 that the main surviving elements from the Marnock design are individual trees and the belt of trees along the road to Wallingford (to the northwest of the site); and the circular route through open lawns. She is writing a short article for the Berkshire Gardens Trust newsletter on Robert Marnock with reference to his designs here at Fair Mile and at Park Place near Wokingham in Berkshire.

All photographs of the grounds at Fair Mile (c) Bettina Kirkham.