Living with the penal past: Memory,heritage and the lived experience of historic prisons

Abstract

Prison tourism research into the memorialisation of historic spaces of incarceration has focused primarily on the experiences of visitors to decommissioned prisons and/or those presenting them as sites of memory. Historic sites that are still in operation as prisons have largely been overlooked. We address this research gap, drawing upon a large ESRC-funded project exploring the ‘persistence’ of Victorian-era prisons in the United Kingdom. We argue that although such operational sites are not being consciously memorialised for an external audience, there are still practices of preservation, interpretation and commemoration taking place within them. Incarcerated people and prison staff still encounter past lives and practices, albeit in more subtle and less curated ways than do conventional ‘prison tourists’. We show how those living and working in such historic prisons understand their institutional histories, and how these histories shape their lived experience. In so doing, we collapse the distance between research into prison tourism and the lived experience of contemporary carceral institutions.

Keywords

Prison tourism Victorian-era institutional memory heritage justice

Introduction

The decommissioning of prisons and their subsequent reopening as museums or other heritage attractions has triggered a growing literature on prison tourism (Wilson et al., 2017a). This work focuses on the politics and ethics of the ways in which the histories of these sites – and of those who have worked or been incarcerated in them in the past – are researched, preserved, analysed, curated and narrated for visitors. It also examines how tourists experience such sites at which history is viewed through curated remnants. This work shares some perspectives with parallel work on ‘prison tours’; the practice of enabling groups – often of students – to visit operational prisons for education rather than leisure (Piche and Walby, 2010; Wilson, 2017). Whilst the latter is loosely articulated with wider scholarship in prison sociology and carceral geography, which has focused more closely on incarceration's lived experience, legitimacy and so on (e.g. Auty and Liebling, 2024; Bloch and Olivares-Pelayo, 2021; Crewe, 2011, 2024; Crewe et al., 2023; Liebling, 2004; Martens and Crewe, 2024; Moran, 2015; Turnbull and Moore, 2024), the prison tourism literature has fewer such touchpoints.

In this article, we connect prison tourism to prison sociology and carceral geography through empirical case studies which are operational prisons. We train attention not on the ways in which their histories are experienced by leisure tourists, student visitors or other ‘outsiders’, but by people who occupy these spaces on a daily basis – incarcerated people and prison staff. We argue that whilst these sites are not being consciously memorialised for an external audience, the practices of preservation, interpretation and commemoration of the past(s) that are still taking place within them merit scholarly attention. Those present within their walls still encounter past lives and practices, albeit in more subtle and less curated ways than do conventional ‘prison tourists’. In turn, these encounters shape their experience of incarceration and of prison work. Attention to such places not only addresses a lacuna in prison tourism scholarship but draws prison tourism research more closely into dialogue with research into the lived experience of operational prisons.

We first contextualise our work within growing literatures on prison tourism and prison tours; introduce the Victorian-era prison estate in England and Wales and outline our methodological approach, before drawing on our empirical data.

Prison tourism, prison tours, prison sociology and carceral geography

The prison tourism literature tends largely, but not exclusively, to cover experiences of prisons which have closed and been converted into heritage sites (Wilson et al., 2017a). The smaller collection of work on prison tours, by contrast, focuses on visits to operational prisons for the purposes of work or study, rather than tourism or leisure (e.g. Piche and Walby, 2010). Despite their different foci, these literatures identify similar challenges.

Prison tourism's work on closed prisons as sites of memory, heritage and leisure exhibits enormous variety and geographical scope, from UK studies of ghost hunting and paranormal tours (Hodgkinson and Urquhart, 2017), to Gulag memorialisation in Kazakhstan (Slade, 2017), emotional responses to Robben Island (Isaac, 2024), dispossession of Native American histories at Alcatraz (Barber, 2020) and politics of Irish nationalism at Kilmainham (McAtackney, 2019).

Closed prisons offer the potential to observe, understand and critique repurposing for heritage and tourism. They ‘potentially provide the visitor with an opportunity to confront, or be confronted by, aspects of society normally sequestered from the mainstream public sensibility, such as the socio-economic factors underlying many of the life-narratives of the average prisoner’ (Wilson et al., 2017a: 5). They can distort and obscure as much as they reveal, however. A prominent research theme is the nature of the narratives presented to visitors; as Wilson et al. (2017a: 5) argue, that which seems to be a ‘fair’ representation is actually ‘narrowly conceived and deeply contested’, with processes of narrative construction building solidarity between visitors and ‘captors’, but distancing visitors from captives.

As Walby and Piche (2015a, 2015b) argue, the articulation of this narrative with notions of prison reform – often implicit in comparisons with an idea of today's better/more ‘modern’ prison – legitimates confinement in tourists’ minds and potentially engenders support for punishment in contemporary prison systems.

The challenge facing those preserving closed prisons as sites of memory or conscience is how to memorialise sites, when some people may have memories of their own lived experience there, whilst others have neither memory nor knowledge of the prison's history (Guenther, 2022). It is assumed that those without memory or knowledge, who are perceived to view the site ‘with indifference’ should somehow ‘be moved, provoked, or inspired to remember something they do not yet know’ (Guenther, 2022: 255, original emphasis), with a distorting effect on whose stories are told. Various techniques do this work of moving, provoking and inspiring: objects displayed alongside interpretive illustrations; and ‘dioramas and staged re-enactment performances’ are ‘used as immersive and emotional tools to accentuate the “dark” atmosphere … and induce a more impactful and participatory visitor experience’ (Tiberghien and Lennon, 2022: 1219). Connections to infamous or ‘celebrity’ prisoners frequently shape the visitor experience (Barton and Brown, 2015; Ferguson and Madill, 2017; Wilson, 2004). Where inclusive curatorial practice strives to enable access to a different narrative via the ‘voices’ of ‘ordinary’ incarcerated people instead, it can meet with opposition (Walby and Piche, 2015a).

Researchers critiquing heavy curation of the past prison (Carlton, 2024; Guenther, 2022; Tiberghien and Lennon, 2022; Walby and Piche, 2015a, 2015b) also recognise its necessity when little remains of the prison as it ‘used to be’, or because sufficient time has passed, or political or cultural change has happened that visitors cannot be assumed to remember it in operation (Guenther, 2022).

Prison tourism is therefore concerned with a subset of the issues preoccupying prison sociology and carceral geography. A full sub-disciplinary exegesis is beyond the scope of this article, but in essence, prison sociology examines the social organisation, power relations and moral climates of prisons; how imprisonment shapes identity, relationships, authority and legitimacy; and how prisons function as complex moral and relational environments rather than merely systems of control (e.g. Auty and Liebling, 2024; Crewe, 2011, 2024; Liebling, 2004). Carceral geography examines the spatial, embodied and experiential dimensions of incarceration and confinement, considering the ways in which carceral spaces – including, but not just, functioning prisons – are structured by power relations, mobility and emotions. Distinct from prison sociology, carceral geography foregrounds space and investigates how architecture, location, landscape and sensory experience shape the lived realities of imprisonment, as well as how carceral logics extend beyond the prison walls into everyday life (e.g. Moran, 2015; Turner and Peters, 2016; Moran et al., 2018).

With a broader remit than operational prisons, carceral geography also intersects with prison tourism, with sites of past incarceration studied as spatial afterlives of punishment (Miles and Sharp, 2018; Strange and Kempa, 2003), with analysis of curation, commodification and consumption of material remnants and affective atmospheres (Turner and Peters, 2015). Carceral geography thus extends study of incarceration into questions of representation, affect and the continuing circulation of carceral power in post-prison landscapes (Moran, 2015).

Prison sociologists focus on prison culture, moral performance and adaptation to confinement in contemporary operational prisons (e.g. Crewe et al., 2023; Martens and Crewe, 2024), and carceral geographers consider how carceral spaces are structured and lived by those who occupy them (e.g. Moran, 2015; Turner, 2016), but prison tourism scholars are more concerned with the ways in which prison heritage sites uncover and present such issues as they took form in historical institutions. They also focus on contemporary visitors’ assumptions about how (differently) contemporary prisons operate, should a visit prompt such reflection. The focus on closed prisons unavoidably means that prison tourism literature is a step removed from other sub-disciplines’ analysis of ‘living’ institutions.

Unlike prison tourism, prison tours take visitors – often groups of students, or others perceived to require this experience for professional development – into operational prisons (Piche and Walby, 2010). Tours take place with relevant permissions and require organisation and choreography to avoid unnecessarily disrupting operations. Visits can be highly ‘scripted’ and incarcerated persons (often involuntarily) involved can feel degraded and humiliated (e.g. Minogue, 2003, 2009).

Following Piche and Walby's (2010) critical initial intervention, and in dialogue with prison sociologists’ concerns for power relations, moral climates, relationships, authority and legitimacy, Pakes (2015), Calaway et al. (2016), Arford (2017), Wilson (2017) and Sutton (2025) have continued to debate prison tours. Some suggest that, when conducted critically, they are powerful educational tools challenging dominant crime and punishment narratives, whereas others highlight risks of penal spectatorship common in the 19th century, where visitors consumed incarcerated individuals’ suffering as entertainment. Prison tours may reinforce punitive attitudes by dehumanising incarcerated persons and reducing them to objects of curiosity, rather than subjects of justice.

Prison tourism's concern about narration of a partial/exclusionary view of imprisonment (Wilson et al., 2017a) – also vexes researchers of prison tours. Both tours and tourism potentially perpetuate voyeurism and trivialise (past or present) prisoners’ experiences (Piche and Walby, 2010; Wilson et al., 2017a), and both risk reinforcing punitive ideologies and obscuring systemic issues underlying contemporary incarceration. However, the relationship with the operational prison is a key difference. Prison tours both underpin understandings of prisons as they operate today and directly influence their internal functioning, moral climate and sense of legitimacy (Minogue, 2003, 2009). Prison tourism's relationship to operational prisons is far more oblique; it engages only where prisons admit leisure visitors, and the experiences of visitors rather than visited are researched.

Operating prisons have previously been visitor attractions akin to today's prison museums. Eastern State Penitentiary (Philadelphia, United States) was a site of prison tourism from the 1830s, continuing a pastime commonplace since the 17th century (Andrews et al., 1997: 178–199; Johnston, 2000: 70–73; Wilson, 2017: 3). Much more recently, recreational – rather than educational – tours into operational prisons have been taken by backpackers in Latin America. Fleetwood and Turner (2017) suggest that backpackers were drawn by a sense of perceived risk, and pleasurable voyeurism. Critically, rather than a tour ‘scripted’ by formal authorities, they were guided by prisoners, whereas in Marek's (2017) study of prison rodeo visitors at ‘Angola’, Louisiana State Penitentiary, United States, voyeuristic visitors had no opportunity to converse with confined individuals. ‘Angola’'s past as a plantation for enslaved people is never far from the surface, but at both sites, the prisons’ present appealed to visitors.

Prison tours and prison tourism collectively analyse different sorts of visits to operational prisons, according to their ethics, visitors’ motivation, scripting, the roles of incarcerated people, implications of visits for prisoners’ dignity and the opinions about prison systems developed by visitors. There is a clear but implicit sense in which visitors to operational prisons – students, backpackers or rodeo guests – are outsiders. They visit, and then they leave, taking memories and impressions with them. Also implicit is a sense in which the experience, by whomsoever it was scripted, was curated and designed specifically for that outsider audience. In these visits, the explicit focus on the present means that few of the processes of curation and narration of the past scrutinised in prison tourism scholarship, are evident.

In the remainder of this article, we draw on our study of the UK's Victorian-era prison estate to detail an alternative set of processes, including those in which operational prisons’ pasts are curated and presented to ‘visitors’ who are (future) insiders, and whose impressions and experiences remain within, and shape the culture of, these institutions. In so doing, we identify and address a gap in prison tourism literature, bringing it directly into dialogue with operational prisons and collapsing the distance between prison tourism, prison sociology and carceral geography.

The UK Victorian-era prison estate

Victorian-era prisons exhibit a diversity of building styles, dates and designs. The architectural histories of individual buildings vary, but the 90 prisons built or extended 1842–1877 were inspired both by the ‘Separate System’ (prevailing from the 1840s and intending to reform via solitary contemplation) and the ‘Silent System’ (associated with the 1865 Prisons Act and promoting reform via silence and hard labour). Internal designs and exterior styles differed, but many prisons had a hub-spoke layout, were built in brick or stone and lacked electrical wiring and (usually) in-cell sanitation. All had small cells intended for single occupancy, arranged along landings stacked three or more storeys high. Galleried spaces and internal atria provided clear sight lines, with officers circulating on the landings and up and down the iron staircases able to see and be seen by colleagues on other levels. Low, narrow cell doorways fitted the average Victorian body, and candle alcoves beside cell doors enabled those inside to read the Bible.

Of these 90 prisons, around 30 are still in operation, holding a substantial portion of the prison population. Nearly 200 years of operation has seen significant changes in the delivery of punishment. Since the 1868 statute abolishing public executions (McGowen, 1994) until the last execution in 1964, Victorian-era prisons were sites of hanging, and their association with this practice contributes to a sense that they are outdated. For decades, media reports have questioned their continued operation, and reports of His Majesty's Inspectorate of Prisons frequently refer to them as ‘crumbling’. A century after Hobhouse and Brockway argued that ‘the only reform to which the buildings can be usefully subjected is dynamite’ (1922: 91), and despite politicians’ repeated promises to close them, they remain an integral part of the estate and are likely to remain in operation for some time to come.

Many Victorian-era prisons have closed and are now heritage attractions. HMP Shrewsbury, HMP Shepton Mallet and HMP Gloucester closed in 2013, and are now visitor attractions, and parts of HMP Oxford have been repurposed as a hotel. The case study prisons we discuss here are therefore contemporaneous with other historic sites, the experiences of whose leisure visitors have already been the subject of inquiry within prison tourism (e.g. Urquhart, 2022).

Methodologies

This article presents data generated via a large interdisciplinary Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)-funded project about the ‘afterlives’ of Victorian-era prisons in the United Kingdom; the experience of these prisons after the Victorian era. Focusing on HMP Liverpool (opened in 1855) and HMP Lincoln (1872), it also encompassed a wider experience of the Victorian-era estate. It was concerned with the ‘persistence’ of such prisons, given their longevity of operation, addressing their construction and maintenance, prevailing forms of management, evolution of lived experience and ongoing cultural significance. We draw specifically upon 167 interviews with: 42 current staff and 60 current prisoners at the case study prisons; 49 former employees of, and 16 people previously incarcerated in, these and other Victorian prisons. Current staff and prisoners were interviewed in person on site during fieldwork in 2022–2023. Former staff and prisoner interviewees were located via existing networks, via organisations for retired prison staff, and through social media, and interviews took place in 2020–2022, (during the Covid pandemic) via online videoconferencing software. Interviewees reflected on their experience of the Victorian-era estate, and their understanding of and relationship to the history of these establishments. All interviewees gave informed consent via signed forms and interviews were recorded via Dictaphone and transcribed for coding. Interviewees are identified here using pseudonyms. The project underwent ethical review at the University of Birmingham (ERN_20-1288A; ERN_21-0600; ERN_22-0068) and was approved by the National Research Council of His Majesty's Prison and Probation Service.

None of the Victorian-era prison estate enables members of the public to enter for recreational or leisure purposes. (Some prisons have ‘Clink’ restaurants on site, but diners do not visit the prison wings themselves.) Prison tourism, thus defined, does not take place. However, this does not mean that the appeal of historic prisons – the curated heritage that draws tourists to prison museums – is absent. The following sections show how the history of these prisons – within which the history of execution by hanging is a critical part – is key to how they are experienced; how new staff are introduced and acclimatised into them; how a sense of responsibility and stewardship works to differentiate between ‘them’ (being the prison system as an organ of the state) and ‘us’ (the building and those who occupy it) and, perhaps most critically, how the historical narrative subtly legitimates the continued operation of this element of the estate.

Victorian prisons as sites of history and memory

The status of the Victorian prisons in which they live(d) and work(ed) as sites of history and memory was recognised by all our respondents and was expressed most vividly in relation to conventional prison heritage sites with which they were familiar.

Prison officers are, and incarcerated people have previously been, members of the public and, as such, they have sometimes visited closed prisons reopened to tourists. At interview, Stephen told us how struck he had been by the similarities between the historic prison at tourist attraction Lincoln Castle, and his own workplace:

Just up the road from Lincoln Prison you’ve got Lincoln Castle, and there's an old Victorian prison in there, a much smaller one. And we’ve been in there and it's identical. And people paid good money to go and visit that and to have a tour and to talk to the officers, whereas we were experiencing it every day and still appreciating it. It is so hard to put into words, but it is just that history and that feeling, that character …. (Stephen, current staff, HMP Lincoln)

Lincoln Castle prison closed before living memory, but for Ian, who had previously worked at a prison now opened as a heritage site, the contrast between working and closed prisons was stark:

A couple of years ago, [name of] Prison was closed … and they opened it as a showcase kind of thing, you could go around …. So, we went around this place … and it was so strange going into a building that was going derelict and it was empty, it was soulless. And I really regretted it, in a way, afterwards. It was one thing to go around and see this place but it seemed to be so cramped, small as from what I remember it, and just dead. (Ian, former staff)

The contrast between the ‘life’ of working in a prison and the ‘deadness’ of a closed one was also reflected in Lisa's comments on her former workplaces. She told us how ‘present’ the histories of Victorian prisons and those who had previously occupied them – particularly those who might be considered ‘celebrity’ prisoners – were to her, even when these prisons are still operational:

The history in them is amazing. And it's not just the history of the building, it's the history of the people that have been in that building. You think of your notorious criminals over the years, Myra Hindley, the Kray twins, people like that, to be able to walk the floors that they’ve walked. Yeah, it's not just the building, it's the people that have lived and worked in them as well. (Lisa, former staff)

For some previously incarcerated people, prison heritage sites also hold a certain appeal. Ollie had visited a now-closed Victorian prison:

[The prison] is shut down now, but you go in. Every day they let people in, they do ghost hunting tours. … And it is just your typical Victorian jail, it really is. Everything's still there, all they’ve done is take all the locks out of the doors and gates. You’ve still got your death cell, you’ve still got the trapdoor for the hangings, and it's actually got a lot of information there. (Ollie, former prisoner)

A key difference between prison heritage sites and operating prisons is curation. Unlike the heritage sites visited by Ollie and Ian, operating prisons generally lack interpretation panels, exhibits and re-enactments imparting historical information. We found that, for incarcerated people in particular, an understanding of history had to be pieced together from a variety of sources. Ollie's interest in the ‘death cell’ resonated with current prisoners’ fascination about past executions. The regularity with which this topic was raised by prisoners indicated that executions having once taken place in these buildings was part of their lived reality.

Staff and library books: Prisoners’ knowledge-seeking

Neil, incarcerated in HMP Lincoln, told us of his interest in the history of the prison, and also his frustration at the lack of available information either about it or about the previous generations of people in whose footsteps he was following. Like Ollie, his thoughts were drawn to one of the few aspects of the history of Victorian prisons that was widely known amongst the imprisoned populations we researched – executions:

Yeah, you always wonder these things. Always. No matter where …. If you walk into a cell like that, you just get that feel, something not right here. You know when you go to prisons where they like hanged people, and you can say ‘has someone been hung been in this cell?’ You don’t know, do you? They don’t tell me that. They don’t give me the history of the people who's been in that cell. (Neil, incarcerated at HMP Lincoln)

Neil wondered whether his was the ‘hanging cell’, but other Lincoln prisoners were confident of its location. Gesturing down the wing, Eddie told us where he believed the hanging cells to have been, to enable a condemned prisoner to ‘drop’, from one level (‘the twos’) through to the floor below (‘the ones’)

That used to be the old hanging cell, so … where you go down the bottom end, as you go onto the first night centre, right at the far end where you go in to the visits, the first cell there. It's on the bottom floor. Up on the twos, the drop, boom. And they used to open in through this floor, through to the hole in the floor, hang them on the twos and drop them down to the ones. (Eddie, incarcerated at HMP Lincoln)

Although Eddie primarily concerned himself with the mechanics of what went on between the twos and the ones, Jerry's fascination with the people involved had led him into conversation with prison staff knowledgeable about the prison's history. Jerry had a vivid picture in his mind's eye, drawing on his knowledge of the hangman, Albert Pierrepoint.

I’m intrigued about people that's been hung here. How they must have been in that cell the night before, and Pierrepoint came up and measured them up and that, you know what I mean? So, yeah, it's interesting. Not that I’m sadistic or weird, I just think it's history, isn't it? And there's nothing wrong with hanging people when they deserve to be hanged. There is actually the cell … have you been to the cell? I think it's A 2–17. The trapdoor is obviously not working no more, but, yeah. But if you’re looking, certain people in here, the older ones will tell you about it, Mr … I can’t say his name, but the officer there will tell you about it all. I think Pierrepoint hung a few here. (Jerry, incarcerated at HMP Lincoln)

With only the thinnest information at his disposal, Jerry wove a macabre narrative anchored – as are many stories told in prison museums – to ‘celebrity’ characters (Walby and Piche, 2015a; Wilson, 2004): in this case the famous executioner Albert Pierrepoint. Like Jerry, Tommy drew on insights from wing staff to verify information heard from other incarcerated people:

When I first came on [to the wing] here, I started speaking to a few people that have known ‘A’ Wing used to be the hanging wing and everything like that, but I didn’t believe it until I spoke to officers and then this came up and it came up a lot more. Yeah, I just didn’t think that that was going to be true, but it is. (Tommy, incarcerated at HMP Lincoln)

Held in a cell in a different wing of the prison, Tommy regretted not seeing the purported hanging cell in A Wing for himself. Instead, he relied upon the officers to recount their impressions.

And then I heard that there's a cell on ‘A' Wing, I think it is, that is where they had the hangings. A couple of officers have been in to see it. I want to, but I’m not allowed ….

At HMP Lincoln, staff like Jerry and Tommy's wing officers may have been able to satisfy prisoners’ historical curiosity, confirming or denying rumours, but at HMP Liverpool, the library was another source of information. Librarians told us two of the most frequently borrowed books were the Liverpool edition of the ‘Hanged at ….’ series of popular history works detailing prisoners’ executions, and Haunted Liverpool, in which HMP Liverpool featured heavily. In addition, the prison library held a small number of precious copies of the multi-volume The Register of Death: A History of Executions at Walton Prison, Liverpool, compiled by a former staff member. Only rarely loaned out, The Register of Death was avidly read by incarcerated people, including Kane, who wondered what the prison must have felt like before an execution:

But I read that book …. The woman who was in there, must be the only book, she said ‘I need that book’, so that's why I gave it back. Because it must be the only one in here. But what had happened was when they were hanging them, or before they got to hanging them, the jail would go … like one of the fellas was saying, the atmosphere of when you knew someone was going to get hanged. Eerie …. (Kane, incarcerated at HMP Liverpool)

Through the accounts Kane had found, he could connect himself to the reality of a prison life long since faded from memory. Although (in the absence of comparable reading material), Jerry's narrative at Lincoln was anchored to the celebrity hangman, at Liverpool Kane had accessed something closer to the ‘voice’ of past generations of ‘ordinary’ incarcerated people, in line with more inclusive prison curatorial practices (Walby and Piche, 2015a, 2015b). Robin, also granted a loan of The Register of Death, had read it for insights into the history of the buildings and how they had been altered in nearly two centuries of operation, as a means of understanding how prisoners had lived in the past.

I’ve read the book, yeah. When I was told that one of the inmates had the book on the jail … because I just wanted to know a bit about the history of the jail …. It's interesting because it does give you the history of the particular person and the reasons why they were here, but also it gives you a bit of insight into the jail itself. It's fascinating. And obviously that's how I picked up a bit about the fact about the alterations and the extension of this [wing]. (Robin, incarcerated at HMP Liverpool)

At interview, we were struck by how many people incarcerated at Lincoln and Liverpool knew the names, dates of execution and details of the crimes committed by those hanged there, perhaps indicating the power of the narrative of individuals when curating prison museums. In the absence of information about any other of the thousands of previous prisoners, in our study, those whose stories had been published purely because of the nature of their death, became a means of understanding past lives lived in these prisons.

Knowledge of past executions, whether at the level of detail gleaned by Robin and Kane or the more straightforward understanding of Jerry and Tommy, affected the lived experience of incarceration. Whether manifest as the ‘feeling’ that Neil had when entering a new cell; or the curiosity that drew Jerry to A Wing, or the reason for a conversation between Tommy and a prison officer, it mattered.

Testimonies from incarcerated people indicate that the history of the prison, and in particular of executions, is a topic for open discussion between them and prison staff, but their relative lack of access to information meant that prisoners generally asked questions, and prison staff answered them. As Jerry and Tommy indicated, staff play a key role in passing on historical details and shaping prisoners’ understandings of the history of the buildings in which they live. These answers, and the information imparted, had themselves been accumulated by generations of prison staff, and the recollections shared at interview evidence dedicated excavation and custodianship both of information and sometimes also of historical records and artefacts, in the face of some indifference from the prison system as a whole.

Excavation and custodianship of history

Guenther's work (2022) details the challenge in preserving closed prisons: how to memorialise such sites when some have relevant knowledge and memories and some do not. A key difference between closed and operational prisons is that in the operational estate, there are no curators or archivists, and this work is no one's formal ‘job’. There is rarely any formal obligation on any member of prison staff to preserve the ‘history’ of a prison – but this activity still takes place.

Prison staff frequently reported ‘finding’ histories; locating traces of the past, often those perceived to have been ignored by or lost to the prison and the prison service; and ‘saving’ documents and artefacts, sometimes as souvenirs, and sometimes in an effort to preserve traces of the histories that they felt would otherwise have been destroyed. Tristan, retired from the prison service at the time of interview, told us:

The Prison Service has never really been good with its own history, really, they’re very quick to throw it away. I remember when I was at [Prison], they were revamping the Governor's block, and they had the muniments room in there where all the old documents were stored. A big skip arrived, and they just started throwing stuff into this skip. It had gone past its date from when you had to keep it. And I said … ‘Governor, they’re throwing all sorts in there.’ ‘Well, if there's anything in there you want, you can have it.’ (Tristan, former staff)

Tristan's experiences resonated with those of Kelvin, who described records being lost unless they were ‘saved’ by individual prison officers:

… and if you go into the muniments room you can look at all your Victorian death warrants. And you could, actually, they were just scattered around, and you’re thinking ‘God, this is history.’ Nobody cared. And they said ‘if you want one, have one’! They were the old books, the huge leather-bound ledgers that they used to write, they’re just thrown around, nobody really cared. (Kelvin, former staff)

Tristan and Kelvin described staff concern at the loss of prison records, but Barbara's recollections indicated that staff curiosity did not always translate into conservation, especially when records had deteriorated:

… people going down into what was classed as the archives at the time, where all these old books were, and old records, old discharge records, and what have you, coming back with sheets that they’d torn out of the book … [They] said ‘here, look at this bloke’, and they’d just literally, rather than bringing the books up, that were all covered in pigeon poo, just ripped the sheet out. (Barbara, former staff).

David described a similar situation, with staff sharing their enjoyment of a particular piece of archival material, again connected with the most well-known and macabre element of prison history

When we were at [Prison], we were clearing out the muniments room … and … over the years, a hundred and odd years, [people] had been chucking stuff in there. And we managed to find Pierrepoint's hanging book, the book of the hangings, and his notes were hilarious. He was training up an apprentice at one stage and said the young man could neither calculate the length of the drop nor do the maths to do the calculation. And we all wanted a copy of that book. (David, former staff)

The sense in which decades ago, now-retired prison staff had had the latitude to deal with these historic records as they saw fit, permeated many of our conversations. Rather than senior management actively trying to rid the prison of its history, we gained an impression of overstretched Governors needing to prioritise operational matters and simply needing space cleared for other uses, and also happy for historic records to be retained by staff rather than lost completely. However, there was also a sense of general disregard at the management level for the significance of records and artefacts. Prison Governors and senior managers, moving around the prison service as they were promoted, perhaps developed less attachment to individual prisons than the more junior staff who lived locally and had personal connections to previous generations of employees. For some, this attachment had led to mildly subversive actions. Nigel, a long-serving prison officer at HMP Liverpool, recalled an instance under a long-departed Governor when staff had actively tried to conceal and conserve historical artefacts earmarked for disposal:

We were lucky that [colleague] at the time just said ‘just put it in there’, because we were bouncing round everywhere trying to hide stuff. We had a Governor who wanted it gone; it had [to be] no burden on the Prison Service. I said ‘it's a [vintage] Prison Service uniform’, and he wanted it just kicking out. (Nigel, current staff HMP Liverpool)

Whilst Nigel's colleagues were squirreling objects away, other officers were gaining knowledge not just from old documents, but from the built environment around them. Kieran and Joel told us about different sorts of messages from the past, visible on the prison walls:

Well, at [Prison] … the old drop where the gallows used to be came down into the Works storeroom. And I saw Pierrepoint's working-outs on the wall. He’d … watch the condemned man on the exercise yard, he’d work out how tall he was and how heavy he was, and he’d pencil on the wall how tall and how heavy and how long the rope needed to be. It was behind a row of shelves in the works store, and that was the old drop. (Kieran, former staff)

Quite how Kieran could be certain either that these calculations referred to an execution, or that they were in the hand of Pierrepoint, is not clear. What was evident in this conversation, though, was the ease with which this discovery had been connected, in his mind, with the famous hangman. Convinced of the veracity of this connection, with all of its vivid mental imagery, it is likely that Kieran's story was frequently retold in the prison where he worked.

Joel had a different story:

When I was at [Prison] as Deputy Governor, we were refurbishing ‘A' Wing and they sandblasted all the walls to clean them back instead of just layers upon layers of paint, and outside each cell there were three bricks that just didn’t look the same as all the other bricks in the way they were laid, they were laid on end. […] we found out that they’d been put in retrospectively, and in the original days that's where the candle sat that gave light into the cell. (Joel, former staff)

Less evocative than Pierrepoint's purported scribbled calculations, for Joel, curiosity about these unusual bricks had led him to a new understanding of how life had been led in his prison in earlier times.

Conversations at HMP Lincoln and Liverpool, and with former staff of these and other prisons, painted a vivid picture both of the survival of historical records almost against the odds, but also of the dedication of many staff in finding history – sometimes literally rescuing it from destruction, and preserving and curating it, whether in physical form or in oral history. In the case study prisons, both staff and incarcerated people directed us towards particular staff members considered expert in the prison's history, and/or who were acting as informal archivists and custodians of historical photographs, records, stories and other found materials. This recommendation was often motivated by a sense of relief, that their knowledge would thereby be safely ‘stored’, as part of our project.

Where only a few of the oldest records had survived, by the time of our research these had often found their way to safety in the Governor's office. Elsewhere, these unofficial custodians recounted how they had found themselves in these ‘curatorial’ roles, and how they kept the materials they had collated. At Liverpool, a member of staff with formal responsibilities for the built environment had found this an avenue for a pre-existing interest in history:

We’ve got a records archive in the top floor of our stores, but … a lot of it is quite modern. If there's a refurb, we’ve got all the drawings. … They started to get a bit damp, so I thought I’ll bring them out. I’ve got a heating issue over there … I found them, and I found the old green register there, the Land Registry. I knew about the execution folder and when I was [working on the wings], I was interested, so some of the Works [department] Governors would show me that, go ‘that [the hanging cell] was on 'I' Wing’, that sort of stuff. So, that's the information I had. And then the other stuff was what I remembered that people had told me. So … I started to put the file together. (Scott, current staff, HMP Liverpool)

These organic practices of individual and collective curation did not exist in isolation; they actively shaped the induction process for new prison staff and their understanding of the institution they had joined.

‘Tours’ for new staff: History as induction

As well as being shared with some incarcerated people, the history of these prisons found its way into induction procedures for new staff. In a direct parallel with Guenther's (2022: 255) observation that prison tourists are inspired to remember something they do not yet know, many Victorian prisons made a feature of the prison's history in orientation ‘tours’ of the buildings, regularly delivered for new staff joining the workforce. On such tours, new colleagues with presumably little if any knowledge of prison history would often be shown some of the historical traces present in the buildings, as well as records and artefacts preserved within the prison, and often told where ‘the drop’ was. These stories were introduced by senior staff as critical information at the very earliest stage of prison work, alongside key information about the location of particular functions and systems in place in the prison. Thus retold and perpetuated, they became part of institutional knowledge. As Olivia, working at HMP Lincoln, put it:

[It's] word of mouth, and just passed down through the people that have worked here. Nobody else outside the walls would know it. … Yeah I was told about it, and you were told ‘That's the cell on ‘A' Wing where they used to hang people, and that's where it used to drop’ and then ‘We’re on top of the cemetery’ [where executed prisoners used to be buried – now the site of the prison administration block]. It's part of the tour and being told all of that. We had a presentation with old log books and people who have come in for just one night because they were begging on the street and what-have-you. (Olivia, current staff member, HMP Lincoln)

Former execution cells and log books stood in for the immersive tools used in prison museums to evoke a ‘dark atmosphere’ (Tiberghien and Lennon, 2022). Vaughan had experienced something similar on his earlier inductions:

… on my initial tour of both prisons [where I worked], I was taken to the execution cell and shown it, and [they] said ‘This is where they spent the week before, and this is where it actually took place, [but] we’ve converted it into something else now’. It was always converted, but it was always known, where this place was. (Vaughan, former staff)

The conversion of the hanging cell into a storeroom, a staircase or a corridor – in fact almost anything that took it out of use as a cell – had happened at both case study prisons, and at many other prisons discussed with current and former staff. Although very little information is available in the archival record, conversion seems a conscious move to avoid holding prisoners in cells with this negative association. Vaughan expanded:

The staff made sure the area was not used for any prisoner, it was converted into a storeroom or something like that. It was never accessible, and prisoners knew it went off this little corridor or whatever, but it was nevertheless one of the key things people knew happened in this jail …. (Vaughan, former staff).

‘Dark’ histories, therefore, directly shaped the practices of renovation and refurbishment, and subsequent lived experience. Management of their knowledge of the location of hanging cell was a key element of staff behaviour, and in turn shaped prisoners’ knowledge of, and relationship to, the history of the prison. We heard frequently from staff that although they knew with some accuracy where the hanging cell had been, they would judiciously withhold this information from prisoners, other than to confirm that their cell was not it. Staff reported that when prisoners were convinced that a particular cell was the hanging cell, they would often refuse to occupy it: ‘… you couldn’t get prisoners in there. “Oh, not going in there, hangman's cell”. They knew. Oh, they knew, yeah, they wouldn't go in them cells’ (Ed, former staff member at HMP Lincoln). It was felt that even being next door to the hanging cell could be deeply troubling. Nate confirmed that confirmation of not living in the execution cell was reassuring:

You don't want to be walking past that room thinking about … you know, it's hard enough going into a cell where somebody had just died in because they committed suicide. You didn't really want to be dwelling on that or looking at that room and going ‘Jesus, how many people were killed in there?’ You know? (Nate, former prisoner).

As Nate hinted, given the age of these prisons, and, tragically, the number of prisoners who would have taken their own lives over the decades, many prisoners knew it was unlikely that they were living in a cell in which someone had not lost their life.

For Olivia and Vaughan, the purpose of the historical elements of the induction tour seemed to be to share information thought by existing staff to be important for new staff to know. These scripted tours closely resemble those analysed by Piche and Walby (2010), Pakes (2015), Calaway et al. (2016) and others, but with the key difference that although the recipients of the tour start as ‘outsiders’, they become ‘insiders’ and are expected to incorporate this historical knowledge into their professional practice. Ed, a staff member involved in delivering inductions at HMP Lincoln, described why, for him, it was important to tell new staff about the history of their new workplace. He would have liked to make history even more of a focal point:

As soon as they start in their induction week … it's strange that I feel the way I do, and difficult to articulate it, but I think part of the induction week, almost your first week, saying ‘this is the place you’re joining, this place has got a hundred and fifty years history, this is the history. And part of your induction, you need to go away and read that, and I’ll be asking you some questions on it.’ I think staff, whether that's their interest or not, they should have to take on board where they’re coming to and where they’re working, and yet we’ve got nothing like that. We’ve got old crusties like me telling old stories. (Ed, current staff member, HMP Lincoln)

Ed would have liked the induction to go further than it already does, and require new recruits to actively learn the history of the prison; perhaps a history based more on historical ‘fact’ than just on the stories he himself knew.

There was also a sense that being able to ‘cope’ with the dark history of the prison and the potential supernatural ‘legacy’ of executions was a rite of passage for new staff. For Jasmine at HMP Lincoln, perhaps Ed's ideal briefing might have prevented colleagues from using their historical knowledge to generate anxiety:

A lot of people go ‘Don’t listen to the stories’ and I was always like ‘Nobody's told me any stories’, but then the random person just goes ‘Careful on ‘A' Wing. They used to hang people there’. And of course I didn’t know about that and people started telling me the stories right before my first set of nights [night shifts], so I walked onto the wings and I was so scared …. (Jasmine, current staff member, HMP Lincoln)

The concerns expressed to us by staff, which led them to divert prisoners’ attention away from the location of the hanging cell, were clearly absent when dealing with their own colleagues.

Conclusion

The purpose of this article was threefold; to identify a gap in the prison tourism literature relating to memorialisation within operational prisons; to show that many of the practices and experiences highlighted in that literature also have resonance within prisons which are still operational; and to demonstrate that, as well as being intriguing and perhaps unexpected, these practices and experiences directly impact the lived experience of incarceration.

It is clear from our data that the heritage value of prisons does not suddenly materialise when they close. The history of the Victorian estate is plainly evident to both staff and incarcerated people, and for some, it holds a deep fascination. Rarely consciously memorialised and lacking the interpretation panels, dioramas, period-staging and other accoutrements of the prison museum, Victorian prisons are nevertheless sites of preservation, interpretation and curation – an ongoing and often collaborative process of making history. There is, as our data show, an imbalance between prisoners and staff in the availability of information and, given their different positions, in their ability (and likely also inclination) to locate, preserve and discuss historical traces, documents and artefacts. Yet it is clear that those living and working in these prisons desire and develop understandings of institutional history, and that these understandings in turn shape their lived experience. Staff are made aware of the history of the prison at their induction, carrying with them the carefully curated knowledge passed on by senior colleagues, and many feel an attachment and an obligation to previous generations of prison staff to preserve the history of their prison. Their professional practice is also infused with this knowledge, from Jasmine's nerves on her first set of nights on ‘A’ Wing, to decisions to put former hanging cells out of use; from the withholding of potentially troubling information about past executions, to the fact that history was the basis of many conversations that could help support positive staff–prisoner communication more generally.

Prisoners’ lived experiences were clearly influenced by staff practices. As our data show, they were also shaped by curiosity about and perceptions of the history of the prison. For prisoners in the Victorian estate, the history of the buildings and the stories told about them, mean that they are quite different places from more modern newbuilds. In the Victorian estate, incarcerated people feel as if they are somewhere, rather than experiencing the rootless dislocation of the anonymous nowhere that can characterise incarceration more generally (Moran, forthcoming; Jewkes et al., 2017; Moran et al., 2024).

Knowledge of this history is predicated upon some form of curation. Despite it being no one's ‘job’ to do so, generations of prison staff have proactively located, retained and conserved relics, be these material or in the form of oral histories. Where staff have witnessed damage to or loss of archival records, they have often attempted to prevent it, or carried their dismay for many years. We also found a strong sense that in the past, prison staff have cared about, and cared for, these histories far more than they have perceived their senior management, or indeed the wider Prison Service, to do. The key role played – perhaps unavoidably – by prison staff in this almost guerrilla-conservation of prison history, added to the fact that the documentary record, where it survives, is also the work of past generations of prison staff (in the form of log books, governor's journals, etc.) very likely means that the resulting stories of prison history have been ‘curated’ to create a particular narrative in which the voices of incarcerated people are relatively absent.

In terms of how this narrative is crafted, there are some intriguing parallels with what we learn from the prison tourism literature. The anchoring of narrative onto well-known notorious or ‘celebrity’ characters or events, a strategy often deployed by prison museums curators to help visitors find a ‘way in’ to an unfamiliar site (Barton and Brown, 2015; Ferguson and Madill, 2017; Walby and Piche, 2015a; Wilson, 2004), is also evident here. In the operational Victorian estate, the well-known history of execution by hanging performs this role much as it does in Victorian prisons reopened as heritage sites. The character of the executioner, Albert Pierrepoint, who became famous late in his career and has remained a household name since, takes on this role, with multiple real or imagined connections drawn to his work by our respondents.

Lacking comparable access to materials, and preoccupied with more immediate concerns, incarcerated people did not, in our study, uncover and narrate their own history of these establishments. However, many were very curious about it, seeking information from staff, from prison library books, and indeed from us. Many volunteered to participate in our project for an opportunity to discuss the prison's history with the research team. This information-seeking indicates an inclination towards an understanding of everyday life for those incarcerated in these prisons in the past. Rather than amusement at Pierrepoint's assistant's inability to calculate ‘the drop’, incarcerated people imagined the chill on a prison wing where someone is about to lose their life.

Deeply implicit in much of this organic practice of curation and retelling is the articulation of historical narratives with notions of prison reform, where Walby and Piche (2015a, 2015b) caution that drawing such comparisons can serve to legitimate the contemporary prison system as ‘better’ or more ‘modern’ than prisons of the past. These comparisons were rarely explicitly made by our respondents, perhaps because in these prisons, where the contemporary prison system is coterminous with the historical building, they are one and the same: the comparison is difficult to draw. Or conversely, it might be that the comparison is just too obvious even to mention; despite its many serious deficiencies, in many ways the prison system operating within these Victorian buildings is ‘better’ and more ‘modern’ than the system for which they were constructed. Executions are a thing of the distant past, and living conditions, with integral sanitation, electric lighting, in-cell telephony and so on, are far better than before. Perhaps the Victorian-era prison today cannot avoid appearing more progressive than it was in its past.

This is important because, as we have seen, the histories of Victorian prisons – both those curated by generations of prison staff, and those perpetuated by popular histories borrowed from the prison library – have made their way both into the induction processes for their new officers, and into incarcerated people's conversations on prison wings. Implicit in stories which often centre around the terrible things that used to happen, but no longer do, or how difficult conditions used to be, compared to how they are now, are narratives infused with notions of progression and improvement that perhaps serve to legitimate and sustain the Victorian-era prison itself.

In this article, we have identified and addressed a significant gap in the prison tourism literature, in relation to the curation, memorialisation and historical narration of still-functioning prisons, as a counterpoint to an overwhelming extant focus on prisons which have closed. Our research project focused on the United Kingdom's operational Victorian-era prisons, but future research could be more expansive in scope and could explore whether and how more modern functioning prisons might also see such memorialisation. UK prisons commonly commemorate employees who lost their lives in the Armed Forces (Moran and Turner, 2023), and there may be other such practices through which prisons curate their own histories. Perhaps more significantly, this article shows not only that understandings of the past affect the lived experience of incarceration in the present, but that there is greater potential for dialogue between prison tourism, prison sociology and carceral geography than is yet being realised.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Yvonne Jewkes and Eleanor March for their contributions to the project underpinning this article.

ORCID iDs

Dominique Moran

Jennifer Turner

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (grant number ES/T005483/1).

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

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