YOU might be forgiven for experiencing a sense of deja vu when looking at the photographs on these pages.

Demonstrators gathered to protest at the closure of a venerable old York mental health hospital? Haven't we seen this before somewhere?

Well, yes. But the hospital featured on these pages was Naburn, not Bootham Park. And it closed in 1988, not 2015.

Until then, there were three NHS psychiatric hospitals in York - Naburn, Bootham Park and Clifton. Today, there are none: Clifton closed in 1994, Bootham Park suddenly last year.

But it's Naburn we're concerned with today.

The hospital opened in 1906 as the York City Asylum. It was built as a series of buildings linked by covered ways. As well as the usual range of asylum buildings and facilities, there were six ward blocks: three on the men's side and three on the women's, according to an informative online history by the Borthwick Institute. There was room for 362 patients.

This was big for York, so from the start the asylum took in patients from other local authority areas. In 1909, for example, there were 344 patients , of which 133 were from outside York. Rather ironic, given the state of mental health services in the city today.

York Press:

Naburn Hospital in its heyday

With the establishment of the NHS in 1948, the asylum was renamed Naburn Hospital and, with Bootham Park, became part of the NHS administrative unit known as York A Group.

In 1952 management of Naburn and Bootham Park was amalgamated under a single Physician Superintendent.

Services were rationalised between them and as admissions continued to rise in the 1950s and 1960s, both hospitals saw an increase in bed numbers. Beds at Naburn rose from 393 in 1952, to 461 in 1961.

York Press:

Protesters demonstrate outside York Hospital against the closure of Naburn Hospital

Wards at Naburn were upgraded and refurbished: but by the 1980s, with the number of inpatients at York's three psychiatric hospitals now falling, a new strategy was developed. One of the hospitals would close, with patients transferred to the other two. Because Naburn was in poor structural condition, it was the one selected for closure.

There were protests as early as 1985: but on February 20, 1988, the last patients were transported out by ambulance and Naburn Hospital closed.

York Press:

Demolition work under way on the hospital

There were a couple of final twists, which will not seem particularly surprising to those appalled at the way NHS bureaucrats allowed Bootham Park first to become run down, then decided suddenly to close it, leaving York without an NHS psychiatric hospital.

In 1989, 18 months after Naburn Hospital had closed, confidential documents exposing mental patients' clinical history were discovered in the abandoned building. They included pink admission forms, containing intimate details of patients' private lives, which lay scattered in wards: and X-rays with patients' names attached.

York Press:

Mrs Josephine Walmsley in an empty corridor at abandoned Naburn Hospital with patients' record files

In 1990, meanwhile, the NHS in North Yorkshire was accused of losing millions of pounds over the sale of the site by delaying until property prices had fallen by 25 per cent.

A spokesman for Yorkshire Health denied the accusation, arguing it was 'facile' to have expected the authority to have been able to foresee what would happen to the property market.

Perhaps it was - as facile, perhaps, as expecting mental health bosses to have paid attention to the deteriorating condition of Bootham Park, so that it could have been maintained rather than having to be suddenly closed...

Whatever happens to Bootham Park now - and there are still those who would like to see it retained as the site of York's new psychiatric hospital - Naburn Hospital is no more. The buildings were demolished and the site was redeveloped as a shopping outlet which opened in 1998.