The Gaol: The Story of Newgate – London’s Most Notorious prison by Kelly Grovier

The Gaol is the latest work in the school of Londonology made popular by Peter Ackroyd, which revels in the city's dank dark side, in its poverty and squalor, and the dazzling if desperate ingenuity of people trapped in it. It is the history of Newgate Prison, once the most important in the country, and therefore also a history of the most spectacular forms of crime and punishment in London. It is almost as much about Tyburn, where prisoners were taken from Newgate to be executed, as it is about the prison itself.

It is a story of eyewatering misery. It describes people shackled forever in sewage-filled cells, and executions for minor crimes, including a 14-year-old girl sentenced to death for helping a forger, although reprieved at the last minute by aristocratic intervention.

It tells of the tens of thousands slaughtered and tortured under the Tudors for religious and political dissent, cruelty on a scale that a Mugabe would be challenged to match. It also describes the quaint custom whereby people could bid for and buy the post of Keeper in the knowledge that they could recover their investment by extorting money from the prisoners for food, bedding or freedom from torture. This is what would now be called a Private Finance Initiative.

In The Gaol, Newgate Prison, which stood where the Old Bailey courts now stand, becomes a murky prism for the history and culture of London during the period of its existence, from the late 12th to the early 20th century. Dick Whittington endowed it, and Thomas Malory, author of Le Morte d'Arthur, and Christopher Marlowe were imprisoned there. It inspired Moll Flanders, the Beggar's Opera, the writing of Dickens and the paintings of Hogarth. It also inspired the Victorian reform movement which, starting with prisons, then turned its attention to slums.

Grovier tells these stories, as well as those of picturesque criminals like the serial escapee Jack Sheppard. He does so in a clear, readable style that takes the reader at a pleasantly trotting pace through the centuries of oppression and inhumanity. A few affectations, like that of giving each chapter a monosyllabic title from prison slang, grate. These apart, the book does not pretend to new discoveries or deep insights, but only to tell the story. The history of Newgate is a great idea for a book, both for the intricate and fathomless horrors of the place and for the way it filters London as a whole. It is such a great idea, in fact, that The Gaol is far from the first. As recently as 2006 Stephen Halliday published Newgate: London's Prototype of Hell, which is duly credited here. But if you want to glimpse the barbarism on which our admired, world-famous city is built, The Gaol is not a bad place to start.

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

For over 800 years Newgate was the grimy axel around which British society slowly twisted. This is where such legendary outlaws as Robin Hood and Captain Kidd met their fates, where the rapier-wielding playwrights Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe sharpened their quills, and where flamboyant highwaymen like Claude Duval and James Maclaine made legions of women swoon. While Londons theatres came and went, the gaol endured as Londons unofficial stage. From the Peasants Revolt to the Great Fire, it was at Newgate that Englands greatest dramas unfolded. By piecing together the lives of forgotten figures as well as re-examining the prisons links with more famous individuals, from Dick Whittington to Charles Dickens, this thrilling history goes in search of a ghostly place, erased by time, which has inspired more poems and plays, paintings and novels, than any other structure in British history.