DR FOX'S TEAROOM - Key Persons

Over the next five years several additions to the buildings on the island such as towers and turrets were made and in Sept 1830 the island changed hands again, this time purchased by Dr Edward Long Fox (1761-1835) a prominent Quaker physician in Bristol and a true pioneer of the humane treatment of the insane. At this time the causeway was heightened using granite from a quarry near Falmouth which belonged to Dr Fox's father, Dr Joseph Fox, and was carried round Lands end in ships belonging to a cousin G.K.Fox. Granite was also used for the characteristic Cornish bastions protecting the island from the sea. Contemporary reports state that Dr Fox spent £20,000 or more on the island. Edward Long Fox lived in a time when people with mental illnesses were treated cruelly in asylums. His first foray into finding a new method to treat people came when he established Bristol's Brislington House in 1804, with the ambition of finding a new ‘moral treatment' for his patients. Dr Long Fox has been immortalised in Weston already - his name was given to the centre helping people with mental health conditions at Weston General Hospital - and there is a blue plaque on the two-storey part of the building that houses our tearoom..