Such policies were not entrenched in their manifesto, but it was an age of pragmatism in politics and sensible arguments were applied in the debate. It is something of a paradox that it was Disraeli’s Conservatives who passed the 1877 Prisons Act and brought about centralisation.
Previously, there had been local prisons and houses of correction - the latter (also known as bridewells) went back to the mid sixteenth century - and there had been ‘houses of industry’ housing debtors as well as convicts from the assize trials. Prisoners working a winch at Wormwood Scrubs The hard labour of the time also included moving the great, weighty wooden beams used in the building: a cranking wheel was used to drag and lift lengths of timber resembling railway sleepers.
#Wasteland 3 the prisoner full#
Some were digging the foundations of a new block of buildings others in regular procession were wheeling in and depositing barrows full of newly prepared concrete others more distant were engaged in the multifarious business of brick-making.’ The brick-making involved machines producing moist bricks, which were then taken to large stacks where they were ‘ skintled’ - trimmed - and then dried. It was an interesting scene: the busiest activity prevailed everywhere. Griffiths said: ‘This, perhaps the finest of modern prisons, of the most vast dimensions, and the most perfectly appropriate architecture, was then in process of construction. All around is a wasteland, bare of all growth except a few tree stumps, and there are pools of - no doubt - brackish water around the landscape.ĭesolate wasteland surrounds the Scrubs in this drawing from Arthur Griffiths’ book, showing the prison in 1874 We have a good idea what the prison looked like in its first years, because Arthur Griffiths, a prominent writer on prison life, was working at the Scrubs in the 1870s, and in his book, Secrets of the Prison-House (1894), he provides a drawing made in 1874 showing a very long block with an entrance and gatehouse in the centre, and another parallel smaller block. When, a year later, work had progressed so that a proper brick prison was envisaged, the place was in step with the greatest innovation in the British penal system - the nationalisation and streamlining of the whole network of prisons across the land. In fact, the fine old tradition of having prisoners involved in the construction of prison buildings (and indeed in the business of hangman) applied here: a group of prisoners, immediately after their sentences ended, were employed to enlarge the establishment.
In 1874, the year the first stones were put down for the Scrubs, there was a growing belief that a prison really could be, in the words of the modern American system, ‘correctional.’ To begin with, it was no more than a shed for the warders and a corrugated iron building for the inmates. But put that also in the context of a great city and the associations of the name escalate into danger, the peril of meeting that particular sickness engendered by a place where a metropolis sweeps away the unwanted and the deviant. Put the two together and it’s a name that, even seen on the map is likely to create aversion, revulsion. ‘Scrubs’ hints at an unloved piece of wasteland. Poet Ken Smith, who had a residency at the Scrubs in the mid-80s, pointed out that wormwood has another name - green ginger - and that it is used in the manufacture of absinthe. In fact, the land was named for the wormwood herb growing there long before the prison arrived. Wormwood Scrubs: the first name suggests a poison - something tart, acerbic, leading to vomiting. What does remain, as a reminder of its Victorian roots, is Du Cane Road, named after the military man who reformed the prison system in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Today, the site - one of the great landmarks of East Acton - is flanked by the Commonwealth Building of Imperial College to the east, and the A40 just a little way south. The line of the Great Western railway runs to the north of the site, and recreation grounds are all around the walls. On Bacon’s map of London, printed in 1902, when Wormwood Scrubs was completed and fully operational - a great prison house at the hub of the nation and empire - it is placed between Kensal Green cemetery and the Hammersmith infirmary and workhouse. 2014 Chapter 1 The Scrubs: A Short History
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