Yorkshire to Nottingham prisons trip

Posted by Tanos on Sun 8 Apr 07, 4:08 PM

Tags: prisons

Last week popi and I went on a prisons trip that I've been planning for almost a year, based on the closeness (from the point of view of Manchester) of prison museums in Yorkshire, Lincoln and Nottinghamshire.

This map shows the overall route, starting in Ripon with its three law and order museums, then York's Castle Museum in the old court house and debtors prison, down to Lincoln's Victorian Prison in the grounds of its castle, a stopover at the Southwell Workhouse outside Nottingham and finishing in the city itself at the Galleries of Justice. It took three days in all, starting and finishing in Manchester, although I'm only going to describe the Ripon to Nottingham legs.

The biggest of the museums in Ripon is the Prison and Police Museum, which was originally the town prison and later became the police station. The collection has been drawn from across North Yorkshire and includes police equipment, badges and uniforms from the last 150 years; a fairly large collection of 18th to 20th century handcuffs and shackles (about 50 or so items?); and some punishment items like village stocks and a bench which prisoners could be strapped down over for floggings or birchings. The first floor corridor shows the original prison cells very clearly, with narrow doorways and raised thresholds to make it harder for prisoners to rush out. The original system for prisoners to call guards for help is in place, with levers to pull inside each cell, which draw back wires, ringing a bell and pulling a numbered metal flag out from the wall to indicate the source of the alarm.

Unfortunately, the Ripon Museums have a rather counter productive policy against photography, so my Ripon prisons gallery only includes a photograph of the corridor of cells itself.

I did manage some decent pictures of the court house, used for hearings in front of local magistrates for minor offences from the early 19th century onwards. The grand jury and justices' rooms are accessible, and the rest of the building is given over to the court chamber itself, with dummies dressed in early Victorian costumes to show how it was used. It's quite rare to be able to walk round a court room yourself and see how things look from all the participants' different points of view.

Finally the Workhouse Museum has some displays about the history of the work house system, and how it provided a safety net for people unable to provide for themselves, but in a way that discouraged all but the truly needy from making use of it. The only other areas are the yard with examples of the work provided to inmates (breaking rocks for road making, picking oakum and laundry); and a corridor of cell-like rooms with insubstantial doors and bolts, which are strong enough to stop inmates leaving at will but not enough to stop a determined escape attempt. One of these rooms has an adjustable restraint chair the insane could be strapped into, with their head immobilised to prevent them harming themselves. (official site for all three museums: www.riponmuseums.co.uk)

The next destination after Ripon was York, and the first visit was to the York Dungeon since popi had never been before (or to the one in London.) This has changed a lot over the years, starting as a traditional chamber of horrors waxworks with a series of exhibits of people suffering various tortures or unpleasant deaths. But now you're moved from one animated display or actor's performance to another, almost like a theme-park ride that you walk through. So it's not as good for ghoulish people like me who like peering at the kit and watching other people's reactions to it (official site: www.thedungeons.com)

In the morning we went to the York Castle Museum, which is in the old bailey of Clifford's Tower, the original seat of royal power in the city. I put up a set of photographs of the prison areas of the museum a couple of years ago, and it includes a heavily converted court house and the old debtors' prison, with its original cells (including a condemned cell supposedly inhabited by Dick Turpin on his last night.) One of the museums longest-standing features are a couple of reconstructed Victorian streets inside the building, with reproduction shop windows filled with boxes of soap powder, hat boxes etc. However, they've now opened up a corridor behind these "buildings" and it's clear they were cells also, as the original cell doors are still there. By digging around a bit and looking behind fire doors, we also managed to find the wall brackets for call for attention flags like those we'd seen at Ripon the day before to confirm all this, and being able to compare them from our short term memory is one big advantage of seeing so many prisons in such as short period of time. (official site: www.yorkcastlemuseum.org.uk)

After York, we crossed the Humber to visit Lincoln, which again has featured in my prisons gallery for a while. As with the court house in Ripon, we were able to try out the lines of sight in the Separate System chapel, which denied prisoners any view of each other during services and forced their attention towards the preacher or governor in the pulpit. Both rooms in fact felt very similar to me, and you could compare the chapel's single-inmate pews to the dock in which they stood during trial, this time with the preacher replacing the judge. The design of the chapel, which is the only surviving one of its kind, was influenced by Jeremy Bentham's concept of the Panopticon: a general design for prisons in which wardens could observe the behaviour of prisoners at all times, and many larger Victorian prisons feature a copy of his octagonal central tower from which this could be done. (official site: www.lincolnshire.gov.uk/lincolncastle)

The next destination, on the way to Nottingham, was the Workhouse in Southwell. This was really a bonus and I included it at the last minute based on its publicity leaflet. As you can see from my photograph, it's a striking building surrounded by a lot of land which was formerly vegetable gardens tended by inmates. The National Trust is also notoriously uncooperative on the subject of indoor photographs and doesn't understand viral marketing in the way photo-friendly venues like Madame Tussaud's have for decades, so no indoor pictures. However, even from this exterior shot, you can see octagonal shape of the central tower, which gave the master of the workhouse good views of most of the exercise yards. However, it predates Bentham and is an imperfect Panopticon, as the gambling boards carved into the brickwork in one of the blindspots testify. Even this week, before its advertised weekday opening, there were lots of other visitors, and the audio guide was excellent and made up for the emptiness of the rooms, as apparently no workhouse furniture in the UK has survived and it's not clear how to properly refurnish the building. (official site: www.nationaltrust.org.uk/workhouse)

Our final destination was the Galleries of Justice in Nottingham. This site has had a gaol since 1449, and the court house, police station and prison have been converted into the UK's largest museum dedicated to the history of our judicial and penal systems. I've now uploaded several pages of photographs to my prison gallery, showing the criminal court, physical punishments, restraints and the wide variety of cells, from medieval pits carved out of the rock, to pitch-black isolation cells, prison wings, and custody cells from the old police station. (official site: www.galleriesofjustice.org.uk)

So I think you'll agree we crammed a huge amount into three days!

Edited Fri 11 Jan 08, 11:45 AM by Tanos

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