“Pauline: My family knew I was moving, but they didn’t want to tell me in case it upset me… they told somebody else to tell me. I was upset. I was going to miss all my friends.
Interviewer: How did you feel when you had to leave Hampton?
Pam: Upset. Weren’t we?
Pauline: Yes.
Interviewer: Was it a bit scary?
Pam: It was scary at first.
Pauline: When we left there, I was homesick. I was saying “I’m back at the Manor”… It was a strange room.”

“I didn’t have any money [when I left Hampton Manor]. I couldn’t go and buy anything. I had no food, I didn’t even have a kettle in here. My brother helped me… We were moving my furniture out, and I’d got my pine wardrobe, 2 pine dressing tables and a pine chest. We couldn’t get anyone to help us, and so we left them. But I’d left some lovely pictures up there, and I went to get them. I hadn’t been down here an hour, and my bedroom was completely stripped.”

“Eventually the Inspectorate came to me and said “John, this building is no longer fit for purpose”. And that spelt the death knoll for Hampton Manor. The great anxiety to all the parents [was] “What are we going to do?” So we then set about, with the directors, [trying to] find somewhere for them to live, because we had applied to the local council if we could build a special purpose building in the grounds. [They said] ”Oh no, you can’t do that, this is a conservation area”. So we had to find somewhere else.”

“It was an interesting closure... The decision had been taken, and when I ran the Family Care Trust, and the Council approached us to say, “could you help us?” really. We had to find somewhere for some people, and the housing department had got some flats... They weren’t bad flats, they were just hard to let... But for what we wanted, they were fine… And it worked very very well.”

“It was making that move from being institutionalised into a community hub where they all lived in their own independent flat, they had their own kitchen, bathrooms and things like that. The first 12 to 18 months were quite traumatic for all of them, because they were living on their own… We had 12 of the residents when they first moved out”

“They’d not known anything else for 30 years.
There were a few people who really wanted to leave. I think the majority of people would have said they were quite happy there… but then if you looked at their lives over a few days, you’d say “well, there’s not much that you’re doing, you don’t seem all that happy…”

For some people I think the move [to group flats] was the right thing, and an improvement... but there were a couple of people, one person in particular, who I think it might have been much better for her to get her own flat somewhere else.”