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The overall winner of this year's Community Care Awards, which featured a record number of entries, came from the learning difficulty category. Alison Miller tells the story of Manchester Mencap's Hidden Voices project, which comprises the survivors of long-stay hospitals. The other nine category winners will be featured in future issues.

Fred Burton doesn't like Christmas pudding. It's not so much the nuts, or the slightly cloying texture - it's because when he was a resident at Calderstones long-stay hospital staff would amuse themselves by force-feeding him with it.

Burton is one of five survivors of the long-stay institutions for people with learning difficulties who came together in the Hidden Voices project to tell their stories of what life was like for them.

Judd Skelton is development officer for Manchester Mencap, and the idea for the project came from discussions he had with Burton about the cruelty and brutality he endured while at Calderstones.

"Fred was very keen that people should know about what happened to him," Skelton explains. "I had seen a production at the Green Room theatre that was put together and performed by young people who had been excluded from school and, after talking to Fred, I thought that it would be good if we could do something with the theatre to show people what life was like for people who lived in the institutions."

Skelton secured funding, and the Green Room theatre agreed to donate rooms and services. Burton was joined by Ian Emerson, Gregory Harewood, Margaret Heaton and Susan Hopwood, all of whom had spent many years in institutions for people with learning difficulties and who wanted to tell their stories.

"One of the common issues was the lack of privacy they all endured," Skelton says, adding that in most cases the only thing that separated residents from their neighbour was a curtain around the bed. The group decided they wanted to create a room that would be decorated and furnished to show everything they wanted and did not have in the institutions.

The group met with a team of artists led by Mike Mayhew, the Green Room theatre's resident artist. Burton, Emerson, Harewood, Heaton and Hopwood chose fabric to represent curtains, bedding and carpets, and symbols were drawn to represent the things they wanted to have and experience in their room.

Everybody wanted a key. Many of the things were everyday items that most people take for granted - a pair of slippers, a plant, a television, a tin of biscuits, a window. Harewood wanted a view of a Manchester street.

The next step was to create five life-size rooms within the theatre. "We wanted to create an installation that people could visit, not just to look at it," says Skelton "but to experience, to smell and feel what it must have been like. We heated the rooms so they were very hot and stuffy, and we put soap everywhere to recreate the smell so many institutions have."

Terrible food was another common experience everyone was keen to highlight. Cold porridge was staple fare, usually garnished with a liberal sprinkling of cigarette ash, and so the group used the theatre's kitchen to recreate porridge and to fry eggs that were then left to form a skin before cigarettes were stubbed out in them. Photographs of these were included in the installation. Every member of the group made a tape recording detailing their experiences and visitors could listen to their stories through ears on the walls.

The installation opened to the public for a week in May, and was very successful attracting more than 250 visitors.

The group will use some of the award money to fund an anthology of their stories. According to Skelton: "We didn't want it to be the end, but the beginning of the next chapter."

The overall prize winner's money will be used to fund an arts project charting the contribution people with learning difficulties have made to the culture and development of our society.

Manchester Mencap is also setting up a support group for the survivors of institutional abuse.

- For more information about the project contact Judd Skelton, development officer, Manchester Mencap, Crossacres Resource Centre, 1 Peel Hall Road, Manchester M22 5DG. Telephone: 0161 437 9465.

- The learning difficulty category was sponsored by Stepping Stones.

The Community Care Awards

The Community Care awards do something that doesn't happen very often - they recognise and reward social care professionals who work tirelessly with the most vulnerable people in our society. Now in their ninth year, this year's awards attracted a record number of entries for the 10 categories. More than 40 made made it onto the shortlist and were invited to London's Hilton Hotel in Park Lane for the ceremony on 8 November.

At stake was prize money of £4,000 for each category winner, to be used to further the work of their project, with an additional £8,000 going to the project judged to be the overall winner.

Disability rights campaigner Heather Mills hosted the event and she paid tribute to the work of everybody in the social care field. Community Care editor Polly Neate said: "All the shortlisted projects here today demonstrate the ability to listen to the experiences of others and support people to achieve their potential."

"I don't know why they were so nasty"

Members of Hidden Voices describe their experiences in long-stay hospitals….

Fred Burton was sent to Calderstones hospital in Lancashire, which housed 3,000 people, when he was two. He didn't leave until he was 17. "Calderstones was horrible. They pulled me off the bed and broke my hand and gave me a black eye. When my mum saw me she cried and wrote to the boss, but the beating got worse after that." Burton was locked naked in a room for a week, and made to have cold baths in dirty water. "They broke my arm with a brush, and four staff kicked me on the floor. I don't know why they were so nasty."

Margaret Heaton went to Brockhall hospital in Lancashire when she was 12 and spent the next 20 years there. "The nurses hit me with wet towels and made me have cold baths," she says. "The staff shouted at us all the time. I started work in the morning scrubbing baths and windows and on the ward cleaning. The nurses locked me inside a room with a shutter for being naughty. They put me in a straitjacket - it used to make my arms ache."

Gregory Harewood was sent to Calderstones at the age of 16. He spent many years there and subsequently at Summerhill hostel "It felt awful and it was frightening. They used to give me cold baths, and give me the needle to make me quiet. There weren't many black people there, and I never had my birthday celebrated. People used to shout a lot, and we were given cold porridge with cigarette ash on it. I am glad they pulled it down."

Susan Hopwood went to Calderstones when she was 11. "It was a dump, it was a lock-up place. We had jobs like scrubbing the stairs and polishing wooden floors. The staff sat down drinking tea while we did the jobs. The staff were bossy buggers and they would hit us if we were bad and inject us."

Ian Emerson spent 15 years in Langho and another hostel in Lancashire from the age of 18. He is the only one of the five to have had a more positive experience. "I enjoyed working in the gardens. I had lots of jobs to do and I liked sweeping the drive and digging the gardens. One day two social workers came and told me and my girlfriend that we had to leave."