An old picture of the Old Kent Road Asylum – Margate branch

This photo of a picture shows the Old Kent Road Deaf Asylum’s Margate branch, around the time that it opened in 1862.  Many thanks to @DeafHeritageUK for pointing that out to us.  It appears in 1917 in the Margate magazine in a short history of the school.  It first appeared in Samuel Smith’s The Deaf and Dumb Magazine, for March 1879 (p.41 of an article covering p.40-3).  It had been for hundreds of years the Workhouse, until a new Union Workhouse opened in Thanet in 1830.  It then became a boarding school run by Mr. Cuthill, as ‘St. John’s College’, then a seaside holiday home for workers of Price’s Patent Candle Factory.

Read more on Deaf History at the Deaf Heritage website.