Many jails still in use today were built by the Victorians. Here’s how their 19th-century design is contributing to a 21st-century crisis
England in the 1840s was a place of dizzying industry, rapid urbanisation and technological progress.
Among the proliferation of inventions, a new type of building was unveiled to the world. A prison, K-shaped with long corridors made of sure, thick walls, and small windows in cold, solitary cells.
The new prison will be most conducive to the reformation of prisoners and to the repression of crime … It resolves itself into a greater uniformity of plan and purpose than has yet been exhibited in prison architecture.
The Illustrated London News in its coverage of the new facility on August 13, 1842.
The piers or partitions between them are 18 inches thick, and are worked with close joints, so as to preclude as much as possible the transmission of sound.
A description of HMP Pentonville in the Illustrated London News, 1843
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