Grove Care is a home for the elderly in Winterbourne, Bristol, UK. It includes a facility for people with Alzheimer's Disease and dementia. This facility features Memory Lane, a strip of three shops decorated to look like a stereotypical English village from the 1950s.
(Photos: Grove Care)
The shops are a post office, a grocery store, and a pub. There's also a working phone box. They're decorated with vintage advertisements and objects. Residents can visit Memory Lane and place a call, mail a letter, drink a pint of beer, and buy a cake.
Memory Lane is an exercise in retro-decorating, a caregiving practice for people with dementia. Besides providing comfortable surroundings, retro-decorating taps into old memories to help dementia sufferers cope with daily life. In a 2011 article in The Guardian, June Andrews, a scholar in the field, describes how it works:
"If you have ever woken up in a strange hotel and had to spend five minutes trying to work out how to use the light switch or the shower you can understand how it might feel for someone with dementia when faced with a new style tap or a mobile phone," she explains.
"If you provide older examples of these objects, for example an old bakelite phone, someone with dementia might remember how to use it and be able to make a phone call, whereas they may not with a mobile phone, even if they had been using the mobile perfectly well just six months ago."
-via Nag on the Lake