By way of introduction to my forthcoming radical history book about ‘Mason’s Madhouses’
Over time, a lot of Fishponds’ history has, inevitably, disappeared with development.
Originally in the outer reaches of Kingswood Forest much of the area had been declared common land and lost most of its trees. By the 17th century mining and quarrying had transformed the land further giving rise to its most significant feature, the ‘Newe Pooles’.
The pools were flooded quarries, probably fed by the Bally (or Bully) Brook which runs from Soundwell down to the river Frome and is now culverted in the Back Lane between the two ends of Brook Road.
By the 18th century the community of miners and quarrymen’s families who lived in the area knew them as the Upper and Lower Fish Ponds on either side of the Turnpike, now Fishponds Road.
Fishponds gradually established a separate identity from the Gloucestershire parish of Stapleton, with a village green – now Fishponds Park – and several schools.
The one run by Hannah More’s father still stands, but the other, run by Cornish engineer Joel Lean, was set in a romantic woodland beside the larger of the two pools. This was Upper Fishponds House, from 1816 to 1837 a well regarded Quaker school for boys.
The building had been owned by James Bridges, lawyer to a Dr. Joseph Mason who had set up a private ‘madhouse’ nearby.
The ponds would gradually be filled in. An orchard was planted in the larger pool when it briefly served as an annexe to the expansive private Lunatic Asylum at Fishponds House.
Self-proclaimed Doctor Joseph Mason had set up his ‘madhouse’ in Fishponds after marrying Stapleton lass Ruth Coombs. Ruth was a member of Broadmead Baptist Church and her husband soon joined the congregation.
His father, also called Joseph, had been a bona fide chirurgeon or surgeon, who ran his own private madhouse in the Gloucestershire village of Wickwar, for the treatment of ‘Melancholy, Mad and Distracted People’. When Joseph senior died in 1738, bankrupt and intestate, his 27-year-old son son took over.
The following year Joseph Junior moved the operation to what was then little more that a hamlet on the outskirts of Bristol. He rented property that would house both his family and his patients. Sited amidst fields on Tovey’s Corner, approximately where Glaisdale Road currently meets College Road, it did well for the enterprising doctor.
By 1760 he was ready to expand, and had the spacious Fishponds Lunatic Asylum purpose built on land that stretched from College Road to Oldbury Court Road. No sign of Fishponds House, as it was known, remains other than the bow in Oldbury Court Road created when Mason’s descendants expanded the asylum to incorporate more outbuildings.
Mason’s original family house would remain in residential use as Fern Bank, for 200 years, but for half a century the land it was set on would function as the Stapleton Poorhouse until the Eastville Workhouse at 100 Fishponds Road came into use. Then from 1877 to 1946 the Fishponds Steam Laundry spread out over the site.
Its vans would once have been a familiar site around Bristol.
When the Fishponds House asylum closed down in 1859, it briefly became Henry Massingham’s Boot and Shoe Factory. The buildings were demolished before the end of the century.
Meanwhile Upper Fishponds House was renamed Beechwood House, home to the Robinson family of paper and packaging fame, before it too was demolished in 1935.
- ‘No Cure, no Pay, Boarding excepted’ – ‘Mason’s Madhouses’ in old Fishponds is set be published by Bristol Radical History Group in 2023.
thanks MIke for another riveting read.