Millbank Prison

You are standing near the site of what was once the most ambitious and notorious structure in London. In the early nineteenth century, the British government transformed this marshy stretch of riverfront into the National Penitentiary, a massive facility designed to reform convicts through isolation and constant surveillance. Its layout was a sprawling geometric maze of six pentagonal cell blocks, each radiating outward from a central administrative core. The scale of the project was immense, costing half a million pounds in an era when that was a truly staggering sum. While it was intended to be a model of modern correction, it quickly became a byword for structural failure and misery.