LONDON’S FORGOTTEN PRISON 1816-1890

A short stroll from Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament, most people probably do not know that the Millbank was once dominated by the National Penitentiary, experimentation in prison reform.

The prison was huge and threatening, and the world’s first modern prison. It was masterminded by Jeremy Bentham, a social reformer who believed in well-regulated hard labour and religious instruction.

For prisoners incarcerated within its forbidding walls, life in Millbank was grim. All cells were single occupation, and prisoners could not speak to one another or socialise in any way for the first half of their sentences. The prisoners were also made to wear masks so they could not see each other’s faces during exercise periods. Both male and female convicts were imprisoned in Millbank. The women arrived first in June 1816. Male prisoners originally began arriving the following January.

Penal treadmills were used in the prison to exert hard labour, a form of punishment prescribed in the prisoner’s sentence. The treadmill penal appliance was introduced in 1818 by the British engineer Sir William Cubitt to usefully employ convicts. The device was a wide hollow cylinder, usually composed of wooden steps built around a cylindrical iron frame, and was designed sometimes to handle as many as 40 convicts. As the device rotated, each prisoner was forced to continue stepping along the series of planks. It was a hopeless but gruelling task that fitted with Victorian principles about penitence accomplished through hard work. Prisoners would climb the equivalent of thousands of feet on gruellingly long shifts. The effort, combined with terrible diets, often led to injury and sickness, but that didn’t stop prisons all over Britain from buying the machines. The use of tread wheels was abolished in Britain by the Prisons Act of 1898.

Another equally pointless device was the Crank. This was a large handle, in the prisoner’s cell, they would have to turn, thousands of times a day. This could be tautened by the jailors, making it tougher to turn, which resulted in their nickname of ‘screws’. It was a pointless soul-destroying form of labour, but one that could be carried out in the cell. Most prisoners had to complete 10,000 turns a day. Crank labour was considered particularly suitable for prisoners confined in isolation in their cells.

The Millbank prison plan encompassed a rounded chapel at the hub of the site, enclosed by a three-storey hexagon made up of the superintendent’s accommodations, managerial offices and laundries, encircled in turn by six pentagons of cell blocks. Each pentagon structure was then set around a collection of five minor courtyards used as airing yards and in which convicts commenced their labour.

The three outer angles of each pentagon were distinguished by tall circular towers, described in 1862 as ‘Martello-like’: these served in part as watchtowers, but their primary purpose was to contain staircases and water-closets. The third and fourth pentagons were used to house women inmates and the remaining four for male inmates.

Every male and female convict sentenced to transportation in Great Britain was sent to Millbank previously to the sentence being executed. Here they remained for three months under close inspection. Despite all the development along the Thames, you can still see a surviving concrete post where the barges harvested up the convicts to take them to bigger vessels that were secured up further down the River Thames. The Morpeth Arms pub, dating back to 1845, still survives to this day. They built it for the enjoyment of wardens, but it’s also said to contain the remnants of a tunnel and cellar that formed part of the prison. Convicts were escorted along here as they were taken to barges on the Thames.

When the prison shut in 1890, 16 acres of land was left vacant for re-development. Today passers-by may not recognise the red-bricked housing estate that stands in its place or the onetime army barracks, now an art college. They may, however, be familiar with the Tate Gallery; its grand entrance stands upon the very spot where one would have entered Millbank Prison, and some bricks from the penitentiary were used in its construction. Some reports suggesting that the Millbank housing estate was also constructed of bricks from the prison are unlikely to be true since the estate is built entirely of red brick. Millbank prison was built in yellow brick.

Traces of the prison have all but disappeared, but its existence hasn’t completely vanished. You get a sense of the Millbank Prison’s octagonal shape through the jagged angles of streets that marked the site’s outer perimeter. The houses that endure were where the prison jailors lived, just outside the compound. If you look between Cureton Street and John Islip Street, you can see a surviving part of the prison’s perimeter ditch, which in the 1800s was a stagnant outer moat.