GO STRAIGHT TO JAIL
Plushly renovated prisons make for secure, quirky homes with colourful histories
FOR 400 years, shepton Mallet prison has housed every kind of convict, including the Kray twins. Now, this draughty slab of Grade-II somerset architecture is getting ready for a new role as an upmarket apartment block.
Admittedly, there is still work to be done. Removing the tangles of razor wire, ripping out the bars on the windows and knocking through the cell walls for a start.
The basketball court in the centre quadrangle will have to go, too, as will any number of imposing prison doors.
Plus the wall chart showing which items of cutlery have been put back post-meal times.
on the face of it, living inside a prison doesn’t sound a picnic. But you only have to take one look at the towering walls to feel that you are living in a genuinely secure environment.
Indeed, as from 2017, people arriving through the penitentiary’s grim, brown gatehouse in Gaol Lane will be there not because a judge has sentenced them, but because they have bought an apartment.
The first phase of the porridge-to-penthouse operation is already complete. The last prisoners have been moved out, and work is about to begin on converting the cells into sleek, wellappointed apartments — 160 in total.
Prices haven’t yet been finalised but you can expect to pay from £125,000 for a ‘cell’ with one or two bedrooms, up to £500,000 for a family — or gang-sized — four-bedroom home.
The new developers are busy knocking through as many as four or five cell walls, in order to create sufficient living space for the new occupants.
Instead of rock-hard beds, there will be soft furnishings; instead of in- cell lavatories, there will be en suite bathrooms. Plus the exercise yard will be transformed into gardens and grounds around which residents will be able to wander at any time of night or day.
Biggest amount of head-scratching involves the mountainous prison walls. For centuries, the prison has been located near the centre of town, but rarely visited by local people.
That said, it sits on the outskirts of shepton Mallet, rather than slap bang in the middle. It’s eight miles away from Castle Cary station, from where the commute to London Paddington takes just over oneand-a-half hours.
‘The site has the highest prison walls in Britain,’ says Richard Winsborough, head of planning at City & Country ( cityandcountry.co.uk, 01279 817882), the firm involved in the conversion. ‘ We see them as a huge asset in terms of providing security, but at the same time, we don’t want the development be inaccessible to the local community.’
There will be a lot of debate in the coming months as to whether the walls will remain an impregna- ble, fortress-like barrier, or will be opened up at various points.
Already, the townsfolk of shepton Mallet have been invited to look around, many of them entering the prison for the first time ever.
This is not the only UK house of correction being transformed in this way. The same company has also bought three more prisons, in Gloucester ( 220 apartments), Dorchester (190) and Portsmouth (240).
In all, some 900 new homes will be created out of what were places from which inmates were lucky to emerge alive (a report from 1773 tells how prisoners at shepton Mallet were witnessed ‘expiring in loathsome cells of pestilential fever and the confluent smallpox’).
THERE is no danger of that today, not least since the developers have made a speciality of giving these and other outdated institutions a whole new lease of life; their long list of institutions restored to residential use includes Bristol General Hospital, RAF Bicester, and Bentley Priory — the former headquarters of Fighter Command during World War II.
‘When these prisons are closed down, they become heritage assets,’ says Helen Moore, from City & Country.
‘Turning them into apartments is a different challenge each time, but it’s a task we relish. Not least because these are such wonderful and interesting buildings. our aim is not to eradicate, but to embrace their former use.
‘In the seventies they’d have knocked these institutions down. What we are doing is giving them at least another 100 years of life. Not only do they help meet the housing need in many parts of the country, they also give you a wonderful sense of security.’
We will see more converted prisons over the next decade. Already Gloucester and Canterbury prisons have closed their doors to offenders, along with Bridewell Prison in Liverpool.
The once forbidding former oxford Prison has become a Malmaison hotel — and the thinktank Policy Exchange has recommended closure of Brixton, Holloway, Wormwood scrubs and Pentonville. As addresses go, 1 Wormwood scrubs does have a certain ring to it.