Holloway Sanatorium was an institution for the treatment of those suffering temporary mental illness, situated on 22 acres (9 ha) of aesthetically landscaped grounds near Virginia Water in Surrey, England, about 22 miles (35 km) south-west of Charing Cross.

Its largest buildings, including one listed at Grade I, have been restored and supplemented as Virginia Park, a gated residential community featuring a spa complex, gymnasium, multi-purpose sports hall and an all-weather tennis court.

The imposing exteriors and interiors have a sister building, the Royal Holloway College about a mile north; Sir Nikolaus Pevsner regarded the two as the "summit of High Victorian design".

Thomas Holloway was a Victorian entrepreneur who made a fortune from the sale of his patent medicines, pills and ointments, designed to cure all ills.

Therefore, on 19 April 1861 Holloway attended a public meeting at the London Freemasons’ Hall in which Lord Shaftesbury, sincerely concerned with mental health, made a magnificent speech, calling for funds for the foundation of an asylum for the middle-class insane.

[2] The meeting took place on 25 May 1864 at which Holloway resolved to spend some of his fortune on the establishment of a sanatorium for the mentally sick of the middle classes "the professional breadwinner whose income ceases when he is unable to work".

I know that your taste is classical and which I greatly admire, but perhaps all things considered the Gothic would be most appropriate, as we can get red brick in the neighbourhood and a large building in the Italian style ought, I believe, to have stone facings”.

[3] William Henry Crossland later recalled that he had not wished to go into the competition on his own and had sought the assistance of distinguished Irish architect John Philpot Jones.

[3] In Victorian times many hospitals were built on spacious grounds in urban as well as rural locations, not only because more land was available, but also because space had therapeutic and practical value: "An asylum should be placed on elevated ground and should command cheerful prospects, should be surrounded with land sufficient to afford outdoor employment for males, and exercise for all patients, and to protect them from being overlooked or disturbed by strangers."

This ideal of the Commissioners in Lunacy was quoted by an architecture researcher from York University, Robert Mayo, in a report for the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors.

[4] A site was chosen, north of the nascent Virginia Water village, directly west of a drop to the Thames plain below on St. Ann’s Heath, part of Holloway's land.

Holloway worked supervising the project closely until prevented by illness: unfortunately he died on Boxing Day 1883, eighteen months before the sanatorium was opened.

[10] In 1911 the numbers were 368 inmates and 227 resident staff, with chief medical officer Dr. Thomas E. Harper and steward Jacob Jarvis Robertson.

However, controversial restraint methods were also employed such as the “dry-pack”, with one patient, Thomas Weir, who died while confined at the end of the nineteenth century.

[12][13] Lyne Place, an imposing Regency house with gardens two miles (3 km) south at Wentworth Park which had been the home of Russian philosopher P. D. Ouspensky between 1930 and his death in 1947, was acquired by the Sanatorium to accommodate staff and patients in 1950.

[6] The management of the sanatorium passed to the NHS on 5 July 1948 which continued its hospital use with a catchment area including Weybridge, Walton, Chertsey, Egham and Virginia Water.

Until 1974 private patients continued to be admitted into a limited number of "amenity beds", paying for the relatively aesthetic surroundings, but receiving standard NHS treatment.

Many patients were allowed to wander freely down to the shops and back, mingling on equal terms with the locals, who affectionately referred to the institution as "the sanny".

[21] The facility featured in music videos in the early 1980s, such as Bucks Fizz, Adam Ant, The Cure, Bonnie Tyler,[22][23] "Pearly-Dewdrops' Drops" by Cocteau Twins,[24] and Alphaville.