At the beginning of July I visited the St Clements site in Ipswich with a view to seeing it as a potential source of photographic study for my final degree project. Having got no answer from the estates management office the route to which forced me to drive around the whole site to travel the 200 yards to the office from the entrance, I approached the main reception where I was given the name of the person to contact and their telephone number. All I seemed to get was an answer phone and then the travellers moved in on site so I thought I’d best wait as dealing with their eviction  was likely to be paramount. I left voicemail messages but never got an answer so eventually I went back and got the email address of the estate manager and got a more or less immediate response with email ping-pong taking place. The task of meeting me was delegated and on 2nd October, some 3 months after my first enquiry, I finally had a meeting where I explained the rationale for my proposal to document the buildings on the site before it is cleared for demolition and the construction of dwellings. I believe the patients will have all been dispersed by then.

In order to photograph such a vast site that has been abused architecturally over the years as can only happen with a publicly owned property, and only by the hand of the PSA no doubt,  one has to take into account the height and position of the sun etc and to use my Toyo View large format camera, I need benign weather conditions, no wind, no rain, usually day break or shortly after. Cloud is good. Aesthetics and atmosphere are implicit in making good straight photographic records.

But no, I would have to be accompanied by someone and as I cannot predict the ideal weather conditions in advance other than taking a gamble on the forecast the night before my request has been refused. I find this incredible. For 9 consecutive weeks in 2011 I took my mother-in-law to St Clements for dementia assessment and I dare say I could have wandered around unchallenged. I drove around the whole estate on the one-way system to locate the estate office. I was not challenged. To ask permission to be on site to make a documentary of the site and the abuses it has suffered through lack of sympathetic additional building or indeed proper funding to support mentally ill patients in Suffolk, a big fat NO on the grounds that I could not be assigned an escort at short notice. So staff are available to chaperone but not to prevent travellers moving in. Something not quite right here.

In many respects this typifies what is wrong with inflated organisations that have an overburdensome bureaucratic support service. I served 25 years as a public servant and play witness to over-staffing or indeed jobs that were done just for being done with no viable justification. I then served several public bodies including NHS organisations as a management and security consultant and again I can play witness to dedicated rightful service and non-productive officialdom.

Somehow, I just knew the outcome the first time I left a voicemail and got no answer. I believe the person delegated the task to interview me got some understanding of the constraints I was working within including the need to re-shoot over several visits having reviewed the technical and compositional results post-processing.

Yes, I am bitterly disappointed with the outcome and the lost opportunity to document a site that has stood as an oasis for local mental health treatment since Victorian times. I am not passing judgement on the historical treatment of patients but  given the news on the wireless this morning that mental health beds are disappearing faster than a banker’s Bollinger the refusal of my small non-costing request to document the site does not surprise me.