Fry’s campaign to turn Wilde prison into heritage site fails

STEPHEN FRY has failed in a bid to preserve an abandoned prison where Oscar Wilde was once held.

The TV presenter and actor had been campaigning for HMP Reading to be converted into an arts centre and LGBT museum to mark the time Wilde was held there on a charge of gross indecency in the late 1800s.

The prison closed in 2013 when the Ministry of Justice (MOJ) put it up for sale and it is feared it will now be sold to the highest bidder and converted into flats.

Fry argued “flowers can be made out of manure”, by using the prison to raise awareness of the history of gay persecution in the UK.

“If living art can rise up from the place where Oscar and so many others suffered then how perfect that will be, for Reading, for Britain and for us all,” he said.

But the Government has rejected the application, which was supported by Reading council, and appears to have earmarked a commercial bidder for the site, whose name it refuses to disclose. An MOJ spokesman said any bids were commercially sensitive and could not be disclosed until a sale had taken place.

Wilde spent two years at the jail after his affair with poet and journalist Lord Alfred Douglas was exposed.

‘If living art can rise up from the place where Oscar and so many others suffered then how perfect that will be’

He later composed The Ballad of Reading Gaol, which was inspired by his time as a prisoner. In the poem, he reflected on the brutality of the Victorian penal system.

Matt Rodda, MP for Reading East, said: “I am concerned that the Government still wants to sell the jail to the highest bidder. I would ask them even at this late stage to reconsider and think again about selling the gaol to Reading Borough Council or an arts and heritage organisation.”