The Horton Nine Thousand

The Horton Nine Thousand is a King’s College London initiative seeking restorative justice for the more than 9,000 pauper asylum patients buried at the abandoned Horton Cemetery in Surrey. It seeks to recover the mostly forgotten history of the ‘Epsom Cluster’ - five psychiatric hospitals built by the London County Council a century ago to establish the largest concentration of mental hospitals in the world.

The project is an extension of Professor Alana Harris’ ongoing interventions, working alongside Friends of Horton Cemetery charity and its community researchers, to demonstrate the national heritage value of this site of conscience which demands memorialisation and protection.

Public engagement activities exploring Epsom’s forgotten psychiatric history have included:

• a crowd-sourced memorial garden in the grounds of the former Cluster Chapel (now The Horton Arts Centre);

• a portrait exhibition based on Emma Brown’s collaboration with disabled artists;

• a film and cyanotype creations exploring the material and ethereal dimensions of the Cemetery site and former patients’s clothing and needlework with Eric Fong; and

• and a new, National Lottery Heritage Funded project on the inauguration of music therapy in the UK as a clinical intervention at the Horton Hospital.

Alongside recovering the life stories and honouring the memory of those who lived and died in the Epsom Cluster through research, artistic practice, and consciousness-raising initiatives, the project advocates for a reappraisal of Surrey’s forgotten psychiatric history. This includes protection of the Cemetery from housing development and its return to the community (and a group of known relatives) as a memorial space.

This page will be regularly updated with news about the status of the Epsom Cluster research and the Horton Cemetery, as well as details of events and exhibitions.

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