Southall
Street, Manchester M3.
Telephone: 0161-834 8626.
Despite
prison riots in the early 1990s, which virtually destroyed most
of the original prison building, and the subsequent new building
which has taken place around it, Strangeways Prison, designed
by Alfred Waterhouse, still
stands starkly against the skyline of the north of the city
centre.
Waterhouse
began designing in 1861 after making several visits to Reading
and Holloway Prisons. Some input into the concept of its radial
plan was made by Joshua Jebb, the Surveyor General of Prisons,
who had designed a similar plan for Pentonville Prison in the
1840s. It was completed in 1869 at a cost of £170,000.
The gaol
was built on the site of the original Strangeways Park and Gardens,
and intended to house 1000 prisoners in its dense brick walls
with stone cladding and dominant watchtower which has served
as a local landmark for many years.
The tower
is like a medieval Italian campanile (bell tower), complete
with machicolations, standing in phallic splendour above the
Strangeways district, and offering distant views all over the
city. It has become so identified with the district that the
very word "Strangeways" has come to mean 'prison' in the public
consciousness. In an attempt to change public perceptions, no
doubt, it is nowadays simply known as "Her Majesty's Prison,
Manchester".
It was here
that the suffragette Christabel
Pankhurst was incarcerated for seven days in October 1906.
The building is the archetypal Victorian prison, and Waterhouse,
(who was also architect for the Town
Hall in Albert Square) employed his favourite Venetian Gothic
style in its creation, though today only the two gatehouse entrances
and the watchtower can be easily seen behind the new security
parapets. Their steep spires and the combination of red brick
and buff stone have become synonymous with public and corporation
building of the period, and were most popular over a century
ago, as can also be witnesses in Worthington's Police Courts
in Minshull Street (below).
