The disappearance of institutions like Lennox Castle Hospital has had an immense impact on the nature and type of care and support available to people with learning disabilities. This change has been hard won and took some years to achieve, as you will have seen from the paper by Jan Walmsley and from the accounts and evidence included in the activities. However, once the closure programme was under way, it was fairly rapid and irreversible. Many of the previous long-stay hospital sites have been transformed. Property developers have moved in to create new uses for the buildings and grounds. Soon, these places will live on only in people?s memories, or in local publications written by people who are keen to maintain a record (see, for example, Goddard, 1996). And there is a plethora of websites, listing archives, both documentary and photographic, of hospitals, now closed, in all parts of the UK (see, for example, County Asylums).
Institutional care has left its mark not only on the lives of people who lived and worked in places like Lennox Castle, but on expectations and attitudes about the way in which people with learning disabilities should live their lives. There are also some difficult decisions to be made, and challenges to be faced, if the alternatives are to be adequately resourced, and if the choices that people with learning disabilities make are to be realisable.
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