The Earlswood Asylum, now the Royal Earlswood Hospital, was a premier asylum in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century England. Originally called the Asylum for Idiots and later in 1926 the Royal Earlswood Institution for Mental Defectives, it was one of the first establishments to care for people with developmental disabilities. It admitted its first patients in 1848 in a small building in Highgate, but soon commissioned a new location. Prince Albert laid the foundation stone in 1853 and opened the Asylum in 1855. Queen Victoria conferred its Royal Charter in 1862. Patients learned printing, carpentry, and gardening.