"Many persons from Dundee, of delicate and sickly constitutions, have found their health greatly improved by a few months residence here in summer...chill wind and damp vapours from the east' are felt less here than in places nearer the mouth of the river".
Accordingly a facility, designed by William Clark and built in Albert Street in Dundee to take advantage of the local climate, opened as the Dundee Lunatic Asylum in April 1820. It became the Dundee Royal Lunatic Asylum in 1875. By the mid-1870s the directors of the asylum were looking for a new and larger site outside the city and chose the 95 acres of Westgreen Farm, east of Liff and west of Camperdown. The laying of the foundation stone on 17 September 1879 was marked by an elaborate Masonic ceremony, involving a large procession of Freemasons and city dignitaries from Dundee. The new building, designed by the architects Edward and Robertson in the Scottish baronial style with a 600-foot frontage and a tower at each end, opened in October 1882. By 1897 there were in total 458 patients. In January 1899 a new private patients' facility, designed to accommodate about 60 private patients, was erected to the south of the main building and placed under separate management, as the Royal Asylum. The main facility became the Dundee District Asylum in 1903 and at its peak housed 1,200 patients and operated the 247-acre Gourdie Farm to provide work for patients and generate fresh produce and milk. The main facility amalgamated with the private patients' facility, to form the Dundee Royal Mental Hospital in 1959. It went on to become the Royal Dundee Liff Hospital in 1963. After the introduction of Care in the Community in the early 1980s, the hospital went into a period of decline and, once services had transferred to the Carseview Centre, a modern mental health facility established in the grounds of Ninewells Hospital, the Royal Dundee Liff Hospital closed in December 2001. The former main facility, which is now known as Greystanes House, and the former private patients' facility, which is now known as Gowrie House, were subsequently converted into apartments as part of a larger development known as West Green Park. Two large murals depicting beach scenes by Alberto Morrocco are on the walls of the former dining room in the main building, not now normally accessible to the public. Morrocco, Head of the School of Painting at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in Dundee, undertook them in the early 1960s at the request of Professor Ivor Batchelor, Physician Superintendent of Dundee Royal Mental Hospital and holder of the first Chair in Psychiatry at the University of Dundee. An exhibition entitled 'Life at Liff: the mental health of Dundee' was held in the, Dundee from 5 April to 16 June 2002.
