Infamous asylum may be sold

Peter Sutcliffe the Yorkshire Ripper

It has been home to some of Britain's most notorious murderers. Now Broadmoor hospital, the country's best-known high-security psychiatric hospital, could be sold off to developers and converted into a hotel or luxury flats.

The Victorian buildings house 260 of the most dangerous and violent patients.

The money raised by the sale would help to pay for a new psychiatric hospital for male patients, among them Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper; Steve Wright, the Suffolk Strangler; and Rachel Nickell's murderer, Robert Napper. It is expected to cost £288 million ($628 million).

A spokesman for West London Mental Health NHS Trust, which owns the 20ha Broadmoor Hospital site near Crowthorne, Berkshire, said: "We have plans to build a new hospital alongside the existing Broadmoor site. These plans are currently with the Department of Health. Buildings and land in the current hospital complex which were no longer needed by the NHS could be sold. A possible buyer might wish to adapt the buildings for a number of uses - which might involve hotel or housing facilities - but there would be planning constraints due to some of the buildings being listed."

The plans were drawn up in 2003 but await final approval. The provisional completion date of 2016 could be pushed back to 2023 because of the credit crunch. Concerns have been raised about the standards of care at Broadmoor for 20 years. In 2003, the hospital was described as "totally unfit for purpose" and lacking "basic standards of dignity and privacy" by the Commission for Health Improvement.

Broadmoor Hospital was the country's first purpose-built asylum for the criminally insane, opening in 1863 after the creation of the Criminal Lunatics Act 1860, also known as the Broadmoor Act.

Its patients have included Roderick MacLean, who attempted to assassinate Queen Victoria in 1882. Dr William Chester Minor, a former US Army physician, spent 38 years there after killing a man outside his house in London. While staying there he sent thousands of pages of information to the first Oxford English Dictionary.

More recently, its inmates have included the Moors murderer Ian Brady, Charles Bronson - known as the "most violent prisoner in Britain" - and Ronnie Kray.

Since a patient, John Straffen, escaped in 1952 and murdered a local child, an air-raid siren is tested at the hospital every Monday morning. If it sounds at any other time, people in Crowthorne village must keep their children inside, as it means there has been another break-out.

- INDEPENDENT