The Victorians were adept at architectural onomatopoeia. Their houses of correction looked authoritarian from without and within. Even today, pri-soners (this one at least) pass through these ominous gatehouses shocked by the monumental stylistic eccentricities of another age. A Venetian campanile here, a neo-Byzantine chapel there; amphitheatres, rotundas, eerie barrel-vaulted underground passages… From the start the mood is set through this imposing architecture of intimidation. As the gangplank is drawn up the prisoner weakens and (if he knows what’s good for him) obeys.
Wandsworth, in leafy southwest London, is an enormous enclosure of austerely functional space. Imagine a cathedral without its high altar, shorn of its pews and triple decker pulpit, its organ and reredos. Pared-down classicism in yellow London brick. You feel like some exotic bird at times, trapped forever in an intricate gilded cage. Just watch, and listen to the beating of wings up in the hammer-beamed roof. They are real, those birds up there-curious creatures unlucky enough to have fluttered into this huge basilica of human discontent.
In the early 1980s, when I began a four-year sentence in this sad place, Wandsworth was still the flagship of an ancient penal regime based on the moral absolutism of silence and separation. Six “living” halls extend outwards from a central panopticonic hub. Cellular accommodation of the most basic kind runs around four storeys (flats) of galleried landings. You might be in the Lloyd’s Building or the fabulous Hong Kong and Shanghai bank if it were not for the fetid air and the safety nets strung across the atria to catch men who might jump. Doors punctuate the interior fa?ades, each with a number, a polished brass handle, a Judas hole and a name tag coloured according to religion. Red door, green door, blue door, red door, locked door, locked door, locked door, door upon door upon door and they are locked-the lot of them-locked and bolted, with two or three men securely contained within each one.
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