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

Apollo, August, 2004 by Gavin Stamp

Look at early-nineteenth-century maps of London or of any British city and the most conspicuous buildings depicted are not great churches or monuments but large institutions with precise geometrical plans. Often 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 structures are, of course, prisons.

Millbank Prison by the Thames was a representative example: built in 1812-28 on a huge octagonal plan originally drawn out by Jeremy Bentham himself, it housed 860 prisoners in single cells. The prominence and scale of such buildings, together with the similar presence of large barracks, reflected both the cruel penal laws of the time and also the fear of revolution in Britain during the turbulent decades after the Battle of Waterloo.

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

In the centre is a massive castellated gatehouse bearing Hampton Court-style portrait roundels on its two towers of two of those great prison reformers whose work helps redeem Britain's enthusiasm for incarceration: Elizabeth Fry and John Howard. Behind can be seen the four dominating multi-storey cell blocks, whose end elevations are enlivened by large Lombardic-traceried windows and which are each aligned north-south so that all cells would receive either morning or afternoon daylight. The whole complex 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 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 enjoy 'Hard Labour, Hard Fare and Hard Board'.

I went to prison for the first time recently. The reason was to see the remarkable but little-known chapel built by Du Cane at Wormwood Scrubs, as it is to be the venue in October for an exhibition and arts auction organised by 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 centre of the prison and consecrated in 1894, this large structure was built not of brick but of smart Portland stone in a French Romanesque style 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 under a timber roof, culminating in a great wide apse. This chapel is at once grand and poignant, and the necessarily institutional character of the building is redeemed by the images of saints and religious scenes in the arches and lunettes of the apse painted on mail bag canvas by prisoners who used fellow prisoners as models.

The most sophisticated work, however, is the mosaic floor in the narthex (now, alas, partially hidden by crude partitioning) which must be an example of so-called 'opus criminale': mosaic floors made by female convicts in Woking and Parkhurst prisons. One of them was Constance Kent, a young woman who confessed to the murder of her half-brother in 1865 and whose death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment after a sensational trial which involved Fr Arthur Wagner, that great Brighton church builder, refusing to reveal the secrets of the confessional. It is known that Miss Kent made a mosaic floor for the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral and another for St Peter's, The Grove, on the Isle of Portland, opened in 1872. As this was another church built for and by convicts and was designed by Du Cane in the same Romanesque style, I should like to think the wretched Constance worked at Wormwood Scrubs as well.

All this raises a question: is it legitimate to be concerned with the preservation of such things on aesthetic grounds when they are associated with so 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.

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