Millbank Penitentiary

Sources

Simon Thurley: Lost Buildings of Britain (book, Viking, 2004) (DVD, Channel 4, 2004)

Sharon Shalev: Supermax: Controlling Rish through Solitary Confinement (Willan, 2009)

“The Millbank Experiment”

Millbank Penitentiary was Britain’s first national prison and the first which aimed to reform rather than just imprison criminals. When it was built in 1812 it was the biggest prison in Europe and one of the first attempts to change behaviour through architecture.

But twenty seven years after it first opened it was deemed a failure and became a temporary holding prison for convicts before transportation to Australia.

It was the first prison to keep prisoners routinely in solitary confinement. This was revolutionary and influential and a precursor of the USA’s current SuperMax prisons.

The layout

In the middle was the chapel, the heart of the prison. Around it was a central hexagon housing services such as the Governors office, the infirmary, kitchen and laundries. This was surrounded by six pentagons of three storeys, each containing cells for prisoners. At the corners were towers containing the toilets and washing facilities. These were surrounded by an octagonal wall 17 feet high and moat.

It was the largest prison in Europe, covering 16 acres and designed to hold 1000 prisoners.

Henry James in Princess Cassimasima said Miss Pinsent "saw it lift its dusky mass from the bank of the Thames lying there and sprawling over the neighbourhood  with brown, bare windowless walls, ugly, truncated pinnacles and a character unspeakably sad and stern. it looked very sinister.”

Charles Dickens in David Copperfield described it as “a sluggish ditch deposited its mud at the prison walls. Coarse grass and rank weeds straggled over all the marshy land in the vicinity. In one part, carcasses of houses, inauspiciously begun and never finished, rotted away. In another the ground was cumbered with nasty iron monsters of steam boilers, wheels, cranks, pipes, furnaces, paddles, diving bells, windmills and I know not what strange objects accumulated by some speculator and grovelling in the dust and underneath, which having sunk into the soli of their own weight in wet weather, they had the appearance of vainly trying to hide themselves.”

John Ruskin first proposed a gallery for contemporary and British art in an essay in  1867, saying "The reach of the river from Westminster to Vauxhall is a disgrace to the metropolis. It might be and should be its chief beauty. Take 15 millions boldly out of your pocket, knock down the Penitentiary at Pimlico and send your beloved criminals to be penitent out of sight somewhere. Clear away the gasometers on that side and the bone boilers on the other, lay out a line of gardens from Lambeth Palace to Vauxhall Bridge on the south side of the river and on this build a national gallery of porphry and white marble reaching that mile long from Westminster Bridge to Vauxhall Bridge and I only wish it may be pretty enough and rich enough for the French to want to come and steal it."

Current site

The entrance to prison exactly where entrance to Tate Britain is now. The chapel lines up with Tate’s Conservation Block. The laundry was close to the junction of John Islip street and Atterbury Street. The kitchen was near the north east corner of Millbank Gardens , at the bottom of Marsham Street. The graveyard was to the north west of the site, about where the pedestrianised section of Causton Street is.

The netwrok of underground punishment cells known as "the darks" can still be seen under the Morpeth Arms on Millbank.

The outer wall can still be traced in the current street layout. It ran along the current Millbank, through Chelsea College’s new D block, northwest through the back of Ponsonby Place, north along Causton Street, west along Vincent Street, through the current London Early Years Foundation (with the Childrens’ Welfare Centre sign on the wall), south east through the car park into Tate (the old Queen Alexandra’s Military Hospital buildings) along the boundary wall with 30 Millbank (where some of the original wall remains) and back to the start point at Millbank.

Some of the original wall can be seen by 45 Millbank and in the boundary wall between Tate and 30 Millbank. Some of the original bricks can be seen in the Millbank estate on the block facing John Islip Street.

Part of the original moat can be seen on John Islip Street, running south east behind Ponsonby place and running north west through the Millbank Estate where people hang their washing (which is close to the Prison laundry).

Penitentiary versus prison - the Millbank Experiment

The penitentiary system was an attempt to find an alternative to transportation by reforming suitable prisoners at home in a national institution through solitary confinement, hard labour and religious instruction.

It was the world’s first modern prison, which specialised in reform rather than punishment or deterrence.

The experiment was carried out in Millbank (1816-1843) and Dublin’s Richmond General Penitentiary (1820-1831). Both institutions were the source of contemporary controversy and Richmond General Penitentiary later became part of St. Brendan's Psychiatric Hospital.

The Penitentiary regime

Changing behaviour through architecture was a novel idea. Prison reformers were critical of existing prison regimes in which convicted and unconvicted prisoners, men, women and children were all housed together and the authorities showed little interest in reform or prisoners’ behaviour.

The three main tools of reform were isolation, hard labour and religious instruction. The sentences in Millbank were much longer than in the old county jails to allow time for reform to work.

Isolation

Prison reformers  believed criminality spread like infection by association so prisoners should be isolated to prevent contamination. The prison site was isolated from the surrounding area and all services were on site: laundry, kitchens, chapel, infirmary, graveyard etc.

Prisoners were also isolated through solitary confinement. Unlike previous regimes all prisoners were kept in solitary confinement, just the troublesome. Prisoners kept on their own could reflect on their crimes and repent. Prisoners kept together corrupted each other.

The prison architecture enforced this isolation: each pentagon was separate, the exercise yards were subdivided into five sections and in the chapel prisoners each sat in their own cubicle.

When prisoners arrived they were stripped of all signs of the outside world and individual identity. They were allocated a number and from then on were referred by the number rather than their name. They were now an anonymous person susceptible to reforming influences. They spoke to no one other than the warder and the chaplain.

Prisoners were kept in their cells on their own for large parts a day. For an hour a day they exercised with other prisoners in the exercise yard, 45 minutes walking round in silence and for 15 minutes working a water pump in the middle of the yard which lifted water to the rooftop tanks, or working a mill for grinding corn. Each day they also went to chapel, the schoolroom and, in some circumstance, the workshops.

Hard labour

Hard labour was a crucial component of reform. The most common task was tailoring, either in their cells or in workshops, mainly sewing uniforms. Other tasks included leatherwork, picking coir (from coconut husks) and weaving sacking. They were paid a small  wage.

Religious instruction

The chapel was built a the centre of the prison. Each morning the prisoners came to the chapel in single file and seated in individual cubicles to sing hymns and listen to a sermon in silence.. The chapel was the only place where the prisoners all came together but the architecture kept them in isolation.

There were also punishment cells known as the refractory cells or “the Darks” in which  prisoners were kept for up to three weeks in the dark so they could contemplate their misdemeanours and ‘emerge into the light’. Often at the end of their punishment prisoners were taken to the infirmary and a proportion ended up at lunatic asylums, causing public controversy.

Building the prison

Land was bought from the Marquis of Salisbury to built the national reforming prison.

Building worked started in 1812 but, despite the first prisoners being moved in during 1816, the building partially collapsed. After this new architects were appointed who built on an innovative concrete raft that ran under the foundations. When this was excavated at the Tate in 2000, some of the concrete still had not set.

The building was finally finished in 1821 and once completed distinguished visitors came to see it.

The cells

The cells were whitewashed with stone floors and unheated so very cold. They had an inner wooden door which was shut at night and an outer grill which were locked during the day to allow air to circulate. Each cell had a hammock and bedding, a washing bowl, comb, hairbrush and soap and a brush to clean the cell. They had their own eating utensils: a bowl, a wooden plate and two mugs, one for gruel and one for coca. They also contained a table and chair, a candle, a slate and chalk and a Bible, Prayer Book and hymn book, religious tracts and usually on arithmetic or another secular subject.

Problems

Within a few years the experiment was see to be failing.

The scale of the prison meant it was expensive to build and run. The building was large and confusing and warders had to pit chalk marks on the walls to prevent themselves getting lost

The prison was unhealthy due to its location, the regime and the diet. The low-lying dampness of the location, on marshy ground, with water drawn from the Thames encouraged disease. The isolation regime brought on psychological problems and prisoners had to be removed to asylums. The prisoners’ diet was initially good and for some prisoners better than before they were imprisoned. But after a public outcry, it was depleted and the prisoners’ health suffered directly, resulting in scurvy and dysentery. An 1854 survey of prisoners being transported it was found to have twice the sickness rate of any other prison and ten times the rate of the news Pentonville prison.

And discipline was a continual problem with prisoners unruly and rioting from the earliest years. Despite the isolating architecture and regime, prisoners found ways to communicate with in each other. They could talk to each other through the brick walls of their cells. Scientist Michael Faraday was brought in, he suggested placing a sound proofing layer between the brick walls but this was too expensive to put in retrospectively. The prisoners celebrated by rioting and shouting for weeks. In chapel they knocked and scratched n the cubicle walls and during the hymns they sang their own words - “how long are you in for”.

The Reverend Nihil, the last Governor of Millbank as a general penitentiary said “the female pentagon is … a criminal nunnery, where the sisterhood is linked together by a chain of sympathies and by familiar and frequent communications …. The communications which many of them carry on with each other are congenial with their former vicious habits, their minds being thus kept in a state at once the most depraved and hypocritical.”

From Penitentiary to depot

In 1843 a bill was passed ending Millbank’s role as a national reform prison. It became a temporary holding prison for convicts being transported to Van Diemans Lane and Botany Bay in present-day Australia. From holding cells, convicts were taken underground to a jetty then to prison ships or hulks.

Women prisoners were held at the new Brixton prisoners but the most unruly continued to be sent to Millbank as a punishment.

Transportation ended in 1871 and Millbank became a military prison. For the next twenty year the prison fell into disrepair and disrepute. It was finally closed and demolished in 1890.

Legacy

The Millbank experiment was influential in ideas about prison and in prison architecture.

Pentonville prison was built with lessons learned from Millbank: its open plan wings discouraged riots and escapes and it was cheaper to run. This became the model for all prisons

After the prison

The site continued to be one of moral improvement: built on the site were the National Gallery of British Art, later the Tate, and the Millbank Estate.

Of the 10 million bricks, 2 million were bought by the National Gallery of British Art for £1000 and were used to build the basement. Other went to build part of the Millbank Estate.