Millbank Penitentiary

Better known these days for being the administrative ‘home’ of political parties of both sides and, of course, as the location of Tate Britain, Millbank in the 19^th century was a far from salubrious address. Once dubbed the English Bastille, Millbank Penitentiary – known familiarly as ‘The Tench’ – dominated this part of the riverside for many decades and represented a style of prison design that is still influential today.

Millbank takes its name from the mill belonging to Westminster Abbey which once stood on what was a lonely and

Map c.1867 showing dominant position of the 'Tench'

marshy riverside road linking Westminster to Chelsea. The mill was demolished by Sir Robert Grosvenor who built a house in its place c. 1736. This house was pulled down around 1809 and within a few years the site had been earmarked for what was to become London’s biggest prison. 

Millbank Penitentiary (or the ‘National Penitentiary of London and Middlesex’ to use its official title) was designed by the radical philosopher and philanthropist Jeremy Bentham. He advocated a move away from prisons comprised of blocks (such as Newgate at the time) to construction on a ‘panopticon’ plan, i.e. with separate wings arranged in a star shape. These wings converged at a central ‘Governor’s House’ from which guards were able to keep watch over more than a thousand prisoners. Services were also concentrated here, including laundries and a chapel.

Bentham bought the land for his ‘project’ -7 acres of marshy, damp ground next to the Thames - in 1812. The penitentiary took ten years to build and cost an enormous £500,000. When finished, the outer moat enclosed over 16 acres and the building comprised six radiating wings, 7 large courtyards and 3 miles of corridors. From the outside it looked like a vast medieval castle with its round corner turrets and conical roofs.

View from outside the perimeter walls

Intended as a reformatory (rather than just penal) institution, Bentham’s radical proposal was that prisoners should be provided with useful work for which they should be allowed a share of the profits. They should also be taught general and trade skills – a “mill for grinding rogues honest and idle men industrious”.  Medical treatment was provided and a workshop set up outside the prison where those discharged could find work. Half their sentence was spent working in their cells – weaving, shoemaking and tailoring were the most common occupations – and then the rest working in association with other inmates. Bentham’s thesis was that “morals be reformed, health preserved, industry invigorated, instruction diffused, public burthens lightened – all by a simple idea in Architecture”.

One of the 6 panopticons

The use of single cells for prisoners was a radical departure at that time. Before this all inmates, of both sexes, were thrown in together. But although this sounds like an improvement, other aspects of Bentham’s régime were extremely harsh. Under what was known as the ‘separate system’, prisoners were deprived of all human contact. Masked and forbidden to speak, they were shut up in their cells except for brief exercise periods. This compulsory silence was believed to lead to moral regeneration as the wretched prisoner contemplated his moral failings. Suicide, unsurprisingly, was common.

Each cell had a small table, a ‘slop tub’ with a lid, a hammock and a rug. Prisoners were given a stick painted red at one end and black at the other. By pushing the stick through a narrow slit in the wall a warder’s attention could be attracted. If the black end was showing it meant you needed more work, if the red end it meant your needs were ‘of a more personal nature’!

Frith's painting 'Race to Wealth' 1880 - Millbank exercise yard

But Bentham’s building was, from the outset, beset by problems. Subsidence was a perennial issue. Its sheer size also meant that even the most seasoned of warders kept getting lost in its labyrinthine corridors - one prison guard is said to have still marked his way with a chalk even after 7 years’ service there. The ventilation system allowed sound to carry, meaning that prisoners could communicate between cells. It was also an ideal breeding ground for diseases due to its damp location and surrounding moat, later filled in. Many prisoners suffered from scurvy or dysentery. An outbreak of the latter was once so serious that the whole prison had to be emptied and prisoners were either pardoned or sent onto already overcrowded hulks.

'The Warrior' prison hulk moored at Woolwich 1846

The irony was that the penitentiary had been meant to replace these verminous, germ-ridden hulks - old battleships first used to house convicts as early as 1779 when labour was needed to dredge the Thames. Although only meant to be used as a stop-gap measure when prison accommodation was particularly squeezed (for example, when convicts could no longer be sent to the transantlantic colonies due to American Independence) , by 1841 they housed 3,552 prisoners and continued to be used until the 1860s.

Given the penitentiary’s many shortcomings the decision was eventually taken to build a new "model prison" at Pentonville and this opened in 1842. The following year Millbank’s status was downgraded, Bentham’s notions of ‘reforming’ its inmates went out of the window and the prison for which he had such big plans became nothing more than a holding depot for convicts awaiting transportation to Australia. By 1850, around 4,000 convicts were being transported annually from the UK, some for offences as trivial as stealing a loaf of bread.  But by 1853 large-scale transportation had ended and Millbank then became an ordinary local prison. Then from 1870 it was used as a military prison. By 1886 it had ceased to hold any inmates.

Tate Britain

Millbank Penitentiary eventually closed in 1890. Seven years later the sugar magnate Sir Henry Tate’s new ‘National Gallery of British Art’ opened on the site. Today, the only reminder that the prison ever existed is a section of the penitentiary tunnels, along which convicts were led for embarkation onto Thames barges, which survive in the cellars of the nearby Morpeth Arms, a pub built in 1845 to serve the prison warders.  Bricks from the prison were also used in construction of the nearby Millbank Estate, built by the LCC between 1897 and 1902 and now Grade II-listed.

References:

Dickens’s Victorian London Alex Werner and Tony Williams (2011)

Victorian London Liza Picard (2005)

The London Encyclopedia ed. Ben Weinreb et al. (2008)

The London Doré Saw Eric de Maré (1973)

Londoners Celina Fox (1987)