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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millbank_Prison

Millbank Prison or Millbank Penitentiary[1] was a prison in Millbank, Westminster, London, originally constructed as the National Penitentiary, and which for part of its history served as a holding facility for convicted prisoners before they were transported to Australia. It was opened in 1816 and closed in 1890.

The site at Millbank was originally purchased in 1799 from the Marquess of Salisbury for £12,000 by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, acting on behalf of the Crown, for the erection of his proposed panopticon prison as Britain's new National Penitentiary.[2][3][4] After various changes in circumstance, the Panopticon plan was abandoned in 1812. Proposals for the National Penitentiary continued, however, and were given a legislative basis in the Penitentiary House, etc. Act 1812 (52 Geo. 3. c. 44). An architectural competition for a new prison building on the Millbank site attracted 43 entrants: the winning design was that of William Williams, drawing master at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. Williams' basic plan was adapted by a practising architect, Thomas Hardwick, who began construction in the same year.[5]

Millbank Penitentiary Act 1816

The marshy site on which the prison stood meant that the builders experienced problems of subsidence from the outset, and explains the succession of architects.[2] It was to consist of a hexagonal central courtyard with an elongated pentagonal courtyard on each outer wall of the central courtyard; the three outer corners of the pentagonal courtyards each had a tower one storey higher than the three floors of the rest of the building. When the boundary wall reached a height of about six feet high it began to tilt and crack. After 18 months, with £26,000 spent on it, Hardwick resigned in 1813, and John Harvey took over the role. Harvey was dismissed in turn in 1815, and replaced by Robert Smirke, who brought the project to completion in 1821.[5] Further legislation was passed in the form of the Millbank Penitentiary Act 1816 (56 Geo. 3. c. 63).

In February 1816 the first prisoners were admitted during the construction process, but the building creaked and several windows spontaneously shattered. Smirke and the engineer John Rennie the Elder were called in, and they recommended demolition of three of the towers and the underpinning of the entire building with concrete foundations, in form of a raft: the first known use of this material for foundations in Britain since the Roman Empire.[6] However, this added considerably to the construction costs, which eventually totalled £500,000, more than twice the original estimate and equivalent to £500 per cell.[2]

The first prisoners, all women, were admitted on 26 June 1816. The first men arrived in January 1817. The prison held 103 men and 109 women by the end of 1817, and 452 men and 326 women by late 1822. Sentences of five to ten years in the National Penitentiary were offered as an alternative to transportation to those thought most likely to reform.

In addition to the problems of construction, the marshy site fostered disease, to which the prisoners had little immunity owing to their extremely poor diet. In 1818 the authorities engaged Dr. Alexander Copland Hutchison of Westminster Dispensary as Medical Supervisor, to oversee the health of the inmates.[7] In 1822–23 an epidemic swept through the prison, which seems to have comprised a mixture of dysentery, scurvy, depression and other disorders.[8] The decision was eventually taken to evacuate the buildings for several months: the female prisoners were released, and the male prisoners temporarily transferred to the prison hulks at Woolwich, where their health improved.

The design of Millbank also turned out to be unsatisfactory. The network of corridors was so labyrinthine that even the warders got lost;[9] and the ventilation system allowed sound to carry, so that prisoners could communicate between cells. The annual running costs turned out to be an unsupportable £16,000.

In view of these problems, the decision was eventually taken to build a new "model prison" at Pentonville, which opened in 1842 and took over Millbank's role as the National Penitentiary. By the Millbank Prison Act 1843 (6 & 7 Vict. c. 26), Millbank's status was downgraded, and it became a holding depot for convicts prior to transportation. Every person sentenced to transportation was sent to Millbank first, where they were held for three months before their final destination was decided. By 1850, around 4,000 people were condemned annually to transportation from the UK.[5] Prisoners awaiting transportation were kept in solitary confinement and restricted to silence for the first half of their sentence.

Large-scale transportation ended in 1853 (although the practice continued on a reduced scale until 1867); and Millbank then became an ordinary local prison, and from 1870 a military prison. By 1886 it had ceased to hold inmates, and it closed in 1890.[10] Demolition began in 1892, and continued sporadically until 1903.