The closure of the mental hospitals in the UK in the twentieth century has potentially obscured the relevance of psychiatric hospitals as therapeutic environments. The thesis explores the impact of closing the large-scale mental hospitals in the latter part of the twentieth century and the move to care in the community on service users and staff 30 years since their closure. This research has gathered the oral histories of older mental health service users who received care in Nottingham’s mental hospitals and those of the staff that provided it in order to understand what has been lost through the modernisation of mental health services, where the relationships between staff and patients are typically short-term and veer towards crisis management. Participatory Action Research has informed the overall research involving participants in all stages of the research project in order to co-construct a history of giving and receiving care with former patients and staff in the now closed psychiatric hospitals in Nottinghamshire. The findings provide new insights into the value of inpatient care within psychiatric institutions and how it has been affected in the shift away from asylum care. Despite elements of social control within the mental hospitals reported by participants, the Nottingham mental hospitals were largely perceived as therapeutic environments, providing rich sources of social, emotional and practical support through the social networks that existed therein, including the social and spatial value of internal and external spaces in the provision of structured rehabilitation for recovery. Participants experienced a sense of dispossession with the advent of care in the community,which did away with the hospital communities that offered valuable occupation, structured social activities, refuge, asylum, and a place of belonging for many.