London’s Newgate prison erected its gallows in 1783. It was estimated that the state killed around a thousand people there. Then, in the early 1900s, the decision was taken to make Brixton prison the new site for executions. A brick shed was built and a pit dug. The next thing to do was to erect the gallows. However, the locals of Brixton didn’t like this. They had already complained about the sight of prison vans going up and down Brixton Hill. Then it was announced that people would be hung by the neck at Brixton jail and The Shoreditch Observer reported that “the change may not be so favourably regarded by a suburb so famous for its middle-class respectability as Brixton.”
In the end, the gallows at Brixton were never used; in fact they may never even have been built. Instead executions took place at Wandsworth, Pentonville and Holloway. In 2019 the affluent are returning to Brixton. They buy one bedroom flats for a quarter-of-a-million pounds that are a kilometre from the building that incarcerates over 800 men. The middle-class - the people politicians seem most eager to keep happy - sleep within minutes of those not allowed to vote. What relationship will the respectable locals of today’s Brixton have to the prison on their doorstep?
I read The House on the Hill, Christopher Impey’s engaging and compassionate history of Brixton prison, whilst nursing an Oolong tea in one of Brixton Hill’s cafes. The man next to me stopped tapping on his MacBook keyboard when he saw what I was reading. He curled his lip and said ‘To me prisons are like sewers. I get that we need them, but I don’t wanna think about them for too long.’
