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THE RESIDENTS

The Philadelphia Association leased Kingsley Hall, in Bromley-by-Bow, East London, from 1965–1970 to house a large, live-in community of trained psychiatrists, helpers and characters with varying psychoses. It was neither a hospital nor an asylum, and if invited to stay, everyone became a resident and in theory equal.


The person at the centre of this radical experiment was the charismatic psychiatrist RD Laing who had written the influential book The Divided Self in 1960 which aimed "…to make madness, and the process of going mad, comprehensible".


This is a portrait of a community and their memory of people, time and place.

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