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Contrebis 2019 v37

LANCASTER : THE REBUILDING OF THE COUNTY GAOL AND

John Champness Abstract This paper details the building and rebuilding of in the late-eighteenth and early- nineteenth centuries to expand and improve the prison facilities there.

Most of the present buildings in the Castle date from a major scheme of extending the County Gaol, undertaken in the last years of the eighteenth century. The principal architect was Thomas Harrison, who had come to Lancaster in 1782 after winning the competition to design Bridge (Champness 2005, 16). The scheme arose from concern about the unsatisfactory state of the Gaol which was largely unchanged from the medieval Castle (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Plan of Lancaster Castle taken from Mackreth’s map of Lancaster, 1778

People had good reasons for their concern, because life in Georgian gaols was somewhat disorganised. The major reason lay in how the role of gaols had been expanded over the years in response to changing pressures. County gaols had originally been established in the to provide short-term accommodation for only two groups of people – those awaiting trial at the twice- yearly , and convicted criminals who were waiting for their sentences to be carried out, by or transportation to an overseas colony. From the late-seventeenth century, these people were joined by debtors. These were men and women with cash-flow problems, who could avoid formal bankruptcy by forfeiting their freedom until their finances improved. During the mid- eighteenth century, numbers were further increased by the imprisonment of ‘felons’, that is, convicted criminals who had not been sentenced to death, but could not be punished in a local prison or transported. Transportation of prisoners to the USA ceased in the 1770s with that country’s independence but resumed in 1788 to Australia (Hughes 1987, 1, 41). Probably the worst feature of Georgian county gaols, by modern standards but also by those of thinking people then, was that little attempt was made to segregate prisoners according to their category: men were often

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Contrebis 2019 v37 imprisoned with women, and convicted criminals with debtors and people awaiting trial. However, the prison reformer, John Howard, did note that male and female felons at Lancaster had separate day rooms and sleeping quarters (Howard 1777, 436).

Responsibility for the good order of a county gaol lay with the High Sheriff, but the County’s magistrates also had the right to inspect the premises. As members of the gentry, they were almost all humane men, but they had few ideas about what steps to take. Little progress was made until a remarkable man, John Howard, the ‘patron saint’ to this day of penal reform, appeared on the scene (Champness 1993, 22–3). He was a magistrate and, after he had been made High Sheriff for the county in 1773, he was shocked by the conditions in Bedford Gaol. He then began at his own expense to study the problems and to find solutions. He persuaded Parliament to pass two Acts in 1774, which laid down that prisoners must be segregated according to their sex and category, that they should have communal day rooms but single cells for sleeping, and that sanitation and ventilation should also be improved (Webb and Webb 1922, 38). Howard (1777) published a book called The State of the Prisons in and , and thereafter spent several months of each year visiting and revisiting prisons in England and on the Continent, to encourage every authority to adopt the standards of the best. He literally worked himself to death, dying in 1790 of typhus caught while visiting a Russian prison (Morgan 2004).

An in 1784 allowed the Justices of the Peace (JPs) ‘to rebuild and repair’ county gaols. A serious outbreak of typhus in 1783, which killed the Keeper of Lancaster’s gaol, had already led the magistrates to set up a Committee to carry out improvements there and the minutes of its proceedings provide a detailed record of building activities at the Castle over the succeeding decades (Lancashire Archives QAL/1/1). The name of Thomas Harrison did not appear in its official records until 3 October 1786, although it is clear that he had been involved in meetings in 1784 and 1785 (Ockrim 1988, 74–5).

Figure 2 Painting by Freebairn (1800) representing the Courtyard of Lancaster Castle before the works undertaken in the 1790s. (Champness 1993, 12: Lancaster City Museums)

There was no overall plan for the development of a new county gaol in Lancaster Castle. Harrison produced plans piecemeal, firstly in July 1787 and then in July 1788 (Champness 2005, 27). None of these plans has survived, and indications of the progress of the building work in the records are

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Contrebis 2019 v37 sparse. His planning was tightly constrained by the existence on a fairly small site of substantial remains of the walls and towers of the medieval Castle between which he had to build (Fig. 2). It can, however, be seen what Harrison designed on the plan (Fig. 3), printed in Clark’s Account of Lancaster (Clark 1807, 16–17).

Figure 3 Plan of Lancaster Castle (after Clark 1807) showing Harrison’s buildings: Male Felons’ cells (top); Debtors’ Arcade, Crown and Shire Hall (left). (Champness 1993, 31; Lancashire County Library)

Like every architect of his day, he preferred to design in the Classical idiom, using motifs derived from the buildings of Greece and Rome: but since all his new works were going to be placed between medieval buildings, he proposed to use what were then called ‘Gothick’ motifs, at least in the main façades, like and pointed windows. The first example of modern gothic in England was Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, of the mid-eighteenth century (McCarthy 1987, 1– 2, 63–91). Gothic was adopted in Lancaster mainly to blend with the nearby buildings, but there may also have been a wish to allude to the medieval origins of the English legal system.

Construction began in 1788 and the first building to be finished, in 1789, was the four-storey Keeper’s House, which stands to the north east of the Gatehouse (bottom right on Fig. 3). Its basic form was a tower with a flat face to the outside, pointed windows and a semi-octagonal front to the courtyard, so the Keeper could see something of life in the gaol. This was the model for all the prison buildings Harrison was to design at Lancaster. Next, in 1792, came the Female Felons’ Prison (Champness 1993, 27), which was built immediately to the west of the Gatehouse (Fig. 3, bottom) to comply with the law of 1774 by separating the women prisoners from the men. It

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Contrebis 2019 v37 roughly matches the façade of the Keeper’s House, to make a symmetrical group around the Gatehouse. At much the same time, south of the (Fig. 3), an attractive arcade was built (Fig. 4) to give some shelter for the debtors, who were allowed to wander around the courtyard. Two storeys of further accommodation for debtors were built above this arcade, and also a workshop block in front to the east of the Keep.

Figure 4 Lancaster Castle Courtyard as drawn in 1824 by James Weetman, a merchant imprisoned for debt. Left of the Keep (centre) is Harrison’s debtors’ wing and the Female Penitentiary, and to the right of the Keep the four-storey towers containing the Male Felons’ sleeping cells and the two-storey Turnkey’s Lodge. (Champness 1993, 26; )

These works had been built within the walls of the medieval Castle, but Harrison’s plans for a further programme of major works could not start until the medieval castle wall, north of the Keep, (see Fig. 1, top) had been demolished and a more extensive area had been enclosed by a new high wall. This allowed the enclosure of the roughly semi-circular site of the Male Felons’ Prison (Fig. 3, top), which is divided fan-wise into four triangular exercise courtyards, separated by walls radiating from a central point, where stood the two-storey Turnkey’s Lodge, from which one warder could see everything. This work was finished in 1796 (Champness 1993, 27).

Standing between each pair of courtyards, two broad, four-storey towers were built; they can be seen from outside, rising above the walls. On each side they have barred Gothic windows, but these light the corridors, not the cells. These cells were used only at night, when convicted prisoners slept alone. They have iron doors, which could be barred and locked, with a barred ventilation opening above them. Such accommodation was typical of what was then regarded as the best practice. Solitary confinement at night was not a dreamed-after privilege but the norm. It aimed to encourage a convicted felon to examine his conscience in the hope that he would come to feel the need for repentance and reformation (Howard 1777, 43).

As work progressed on the County Gaol, the authorities thought that it would be fitting to replace Court (then in the medieval Hall) and also the Shire Hall (then in the Keep), presumably, 42

Contrebis 2019 v37 to make them worthy of the County Palatine of Lancaster with its royal connections. Before new court buildings could be erected, however, land had to be bought beyond the castle ditch to the west and then surrounded by a high retaining wall to form a terrace (Fig. 1, left). It was not until 1796 that the Medieval Hall, which stood to the south-west of the Keep, was gutted. Thereafter, the impressive symmetrical group of buildings to the west of the Keep was begun to accommodate the new Courts, which survive to this day. The lower floor of the round tower on the north accommodates the so-called Drop Room, from which, until 1865, condemned felons were led to a scaffold, where they were hanged in public (Champness 1993, 35). Above the Drop Room is the attractive Grand Room, where they met to decide whether the case against a prisoner was sufficiently strong for a trial at the Assizes. The room retains its traceried windows and much of its original Gillow furniture, bought by the County authorities and used by the JPs, until the Grand Jury system was abolished in 1933 (Administration of Justice (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act).

Work on the courts progressed slowly, however, partly because money was not readily available for major projects after the outbreak of war with the French Republic, and partly because Harrison had moved to in 1795, where he was designing a similar complex of gaol and courts (Champness 1993, 29). A year into the construction, in summer 1797, Harrison requested an extension of his contract to complete the work on the Shire Hall. During the winter of 1797–8, old houses on the site were demolished and as many as 75 men were at work, but progress was delayed in the spring of 1798 due to a shortage of seasoned timber and by a two-week strike by the joiners in May (Lancashire Archives QAL/1/1). The more straightforward Crown Court, constructed against the wall of the Keep and lit principally from windows in the upper part of the west wall, was finished first. The structural shell of the Shire Hall was only roofed in July 1798 (Fig. 3, left).

The Shire Hall is clearly a reworking in Gothick style of the Shire Hall at Chester, which Harrison had designed a few years previously. It is a splendid semi-circular room, about 80 feet in diameter, perhaps Harrison’s finest room anywhere (Fig. 5). It could be described as one of the most elegant and spacious halls of justice in Great Britain, harmonising beautifully with the style of the ancient structure which it completes and adorns (The Times 1816). Six slender Gothic piers carry not merely most of the weight of the timber half-arches, which support the panelled ‘vault’ over the main part of the courtroom, but also the arches which separate the court from the surrounding aisle under its plaster vault. This is an attractive and ingenious solution, allowing the public to stand behind the arcade to watch the business of the court proceed in dignified surroundings. The judges’ bench, with its elaborate canopies, is placed across the diameter of the room, under a great four- centred arch, panelled with tracery. The room is well lit by the windows on the circumference of the room, which make the legal process more visible and also catch the afternoon sun, allowing light to play on the forms of the piers and vaulting ribs.

However, the delay had been too great for the patience of the JPs. With the bulk of the work complete, the members of the Castle Committee resolved unanimously not to extend Harrison’s contract. They thought that he had delayed the production of working drawings unnecessarily and had too often reworked the details of a design while it was being built (Champness 2005, 52). Harrison was a perfectionist, and the Chester JPs would have agreed. Yet the Committee’s records show that the authorities had allowed the project to grow without much thought for the cost, and that, because the County Treasurer did not make regular payments to Harrison, the latter had had to spend his own money in 1793 to get any work done, and matters were not settled until August 1804. It is not clear from the records how much the buildings cost, though Clark in 1807 gave an estimate of ‘upwards of £40,000’ (Clark 1807, 28).

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Contrebis 2019 v37

Despite their difficulties, the JPs were well pleased with their new Castle, and in 1799 they commissioned the artist, Robert Freebairn, to paint a dozen watercolours for presentation to George III (Champness 2005, 53). The external views suggest that the work was complete, but the interiors of the Crown Court and Shire Hall show, with surprising honesty, little more than the structural shells with a few fittings.

When the Treaty of Amiens in 1802 brought a lull in the war with France, more money became available, and so Joseph Gandy, a young architect trained by James Wyatt, was called in to complete the furnishings and interior decorations of the Crown Court and Shire Hall (Champness 1993, 30). It is to Gandy that we owe the pretty decorative screens behind the judges’ benches in the Shire Hall and Crown Court and the panelled tracery of the windows there and in Adrian’s Tower and the Grand Jury Room. Gandy may also have provided the design for the King’s Evidence Tower next to the Well Tower, a smaller version of Harrison’s felons’ towers, where criminals, who were prepared to accuse their accomplices, were housed and protected. He certainly designed the last major extension to the Georgian prison, the Female Penitentiary, which was erected between 1818 and 1821 between the Gatehouse and Adrian’s Tower (Fig. 4, far left). For this he produced a design of considerable originality, based on Jeremy Bentham’s ideas for the cost- saving and effective supervision of prisoners – his so-called ‘Panopticon’ system (Bentham 1791; Champness 1993, 31, 33). The building is segmental in plan and contains five tiers of nine cells, each with a window in the external wall, arranged in a semi-circle. Originally, the cells had no door, but a grille leading off an internal gallery, so that the inmate of each cell could be seen from a central control room. The top floor was used as a workroom. It has been somewhat changed since 1821, but the original arrangement is still clearly recognisable, and it is now the only building of its kind in existence in Britain.

Figure 5 The Shire Hall extending west from the Keep (Champness 1993, 28; Lancaster City Museums)

The construction of these new courts and cells between the 1780s and 1820s signified a concerted effort at ‘modernisation’, an attempt, in so far as it was possible, to adapt a medieval fortress to 44

Contrebis 2019 v37 meet the needs, tastes and principles of a rapidly changing society. The magnificent new decorative courts reflected the increasing importance, status and wealth of the county. Although the continued presence of the debtors within its walls was problematic, its new solitary cells for criminals were modelled on the latest principles, which stressed the increasing separation of prisoners and sexes, and emphasised reform and penitence, rather than punishment (Howard 1777, 43–4, 46).

Acknowlegdgements This chapter, based on the text of John Champness’ lecture at the Castle Symposium in 2002, was submitted prior to the publication of his book on Thomas Harrison, which contains fuller details of Harrison’s involvement in the building works. Appropriate references have been added from this work and other relevant sources.

Author Profile John Champness was for many years the Conservation Officer with Lancashire County Council. He published eight books on Lancaster and Lancashire’s architectural and industrial heritage.

References Act of Parliament 1784. An Act to Enable Justices of the Peace to Build and Repair Gaols... 24 Geo. III c.54 Administration of Justice (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1933 http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Geo5/23-24/36/contents Bentham J 1791 Panopticon: or, The Inspection House. : T Payne Champness J 1993 Lancaster Castle: a Brief History, Preston: Lancashire County Books Champness J 2005 Thomas Harrison, Georgian Architect of Chester and Lancaster, 1744–1829. Lancaster: Centre for North-West Regional Studies, Clark C 1807 An Historical and Descriptive Account of the Town of Lancaster. Lancaster: C Clark printer Howard J 1777 The State of the Prisons in England and Wales. Warrington Hughes R 1987 The Fatal Shore: a History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1787–1868. London: Collins Harvill Lancashire Archives, QAL/1/1: Lancaster Castle Committee Proceedings, 29 April 1783 to 14 August 1848 McCarthy M 1987 The Origins of the Gothic Revival. New Haven: Yale University Press Morgan R 2004 Howard, John (1726?-1790) : Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Ockrim MAR 1988 The Life and Work of Thomas Harrison of Chester. Unpublished PhD thesis, Courtauld Institute of Art, London The Times, 1816 4th September, p3 Webb S and Webb B 1922 English Prisons under Local Government. London: Longmans

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