In carceri: in the past, prison architecture used the language of the Sublime to proclaim its mission. Today, we hypocritically prefer prisons to be anonymous

gaze at early-nineteenth-century maps of London or of any British city and the greatest in quantity conspicuous buildings depicted are not great churches or records but large institutions with precise geometrical plans. repeatedly placed in isolation outside built-up areas and designed to conform to ideal utilitarian Benthamite or 'Panopticon' plans to facilitate the efficient supervision of their occupants, these polygonal, walled constructions are, of course, prisons.

Millbank Prison through the Thames was a representative example: built in 1812-28 upon a huge octagonal plan originally drawn without by Jeremy Bentham himself, it housed 860 prisoners in single confined apartments The prominence and scale of like buildings, together with the similar vicinity of large barracks, reflected one as well as the other the cruel penal laws of the time and also the fear of revolution in Britain during the wild decades after the Battle of Waterloo.

Prisons are les conspicuous today--at least upon maps. With that obsession with concealment which appeals to the official mind if not to belonging to all sense, prisons like military establishments--are indicated as if they do not exist. upon the London A to Z for instance, the Hammersmith Hospital in Du Cane Road is marked with all its buildings carefully outlined on the contrary its immediate institutional neighbour is a large destitute of contents space simply labelled: 'H.M. Prison'. This in fact is the celebrated--or notorious--Wormwood cleans and cartographic censorship seems rather superfluous when its massive yellow-brick buildings can be easily studied from the highway or from the Central Line embankment immediately to the south

In the midmost point is a massive castellated gatehouse bearing Hampton Court-style portrait roundel upon its two towers of sum of two units of those great prison reformers whose work helps buy back Britain's enthusiasm for incarceration: Elizabeth cook in boiling fat and John Howard. Behind can be seen the four dominating multi-storey small room blocks, whose end elevations are enlivened by dint of large Lombardic-traceried windows and which are each aligned north-south in the way that that all cells would receive either morning or afternoon daylight. The whole mixed was built in 1874-91 to replace Millbank (so fleeing that site in Pimlico for building the Tate Gallery). And it was all designed by the agency of a former Royal Engineer, Major-General Sir Edmund Du Cane (1830-1903) the then surveyor-general of prisons, who became the chairman of the Prison Commission in 1878 and assured the public that those judicially confined would take delight in 'Hard Labour, Hard Fare and Hard Board'.

I went to prison for the first time lately The reason was to diocese the remarkable but little-known chapel built by dint of Du Cane at Wormwood scours as it is to be the venue in October for an exhibition and arts auction organised by the agency of the Koestler Awards Trust (an opportunity for the public to visit the building as well as to support the Trust's enlightened and necessary work with prisoners). Sited in the middle of the prison and consecrated in 1894 this large manner of making was built not of brick on the other hand of smart Portland stone in a French Romanesque mode of expression which looks as if it was taken straight from the engravings in Viollet-le-Duc's Dictionnaire. Outside it is a repetitive composition of round-arched windows; inside it is a broad aisled space below a timber roof, culminating in a great wide apse. This chapel is at one time grand and poignant, and the necessarily institutional character of the building is buy backed by the images of saints and religious displays in the arches and lunette of the apse painted upon mail bag canvas by prisoners who used associate prisoners as models.

The greatest in quantity sophisticated work, however, is the mosaic floor in the narthex (now, alas, partially hidden by means of crude partitioning) which must be an example of so-called 'opus criminale': mosaic floors made by the agency of female convicts in Woking and Parkhurst prisons. single of them was Constance Kent a young woman who acknowledge ed to the murder of her half-brother in 1865 and whose death decision was commuted to life imprisonment after a sensational trial which involved Fr Arthur Wagner, that great Brighton meeting-house builder, refusing to reveal the hiddens of the confessional. It is known that Miss Kent made a mosaic floor for the vault of St Paul's Cathedral and another for St Peter's, The thicket on the Isle of Portland, uncloseed in 1872. As this was another house of worship built for and by convicts and was designed by means of Du Cane in the same Romanesque turn of expression I should like to think the wretched Constance worked at Wormwood cleans as well.

All this raises a question: is it legitimate to be touched with the preservation of of the like kind things on aesthetic grounds when they are associated with in the way that much suffering? Prisons can certainly make magnificent architecture. Piranesi knew that when he made his etchings of Carceri: those sinister, dark vaulted interiors filled with menace which remain the ultimate in Sublime fantasy architecture.

similar images certainly inspired George Dance junior--Soane's master--when he designed Newgate Prison. This was a terrible place where unspeakable things were done, on the other hand the facade was magnificent: a in truth Sublime monumental rusticated Classical composition which powerfully symbolised its intimidating function. An 1854 guide to London described it as 'the greatest in quantity grim of all the misbuilt London prisons Its exterior architecture, however, has been plenteous admired by foreigners'.