Victorian Prison

• Lincoln's Felon's Wing demolished and replaced by the Crown Wing


  1848
• Crown Wing


  Based on a design by William Adams Nicholson, referred to as the Victorian Prison
• Prisoners held in the Victorian Prison

  • Male
  • Female
  • Child
  • Criminals waiting to be executed
  • Criminals waiting to be transferred to other prisons
• Victorian Prison


  • H-shaped building with enclosed exercise yards in-between its wings
• Separate system prison


  Introduced into Lincolnshire by Joshua Jebb, who had built the model prison at Pentonville
• Separate system prison


  • Prisoners were to be kept separate from each other at all times so that they could contemplate the errors of their lives alone and in silence
  • The only person prisoners were allowed to speak to was the prison chaplain
  • Separate exercise yards where prisoners had to exercise alone, had a better system of sewage and drainage than the city of Lincoln had outside the castle walls
• Male and female cells

  • Placed on separate landings, each with its own stone bath
  • Arrangement of cells around a central landing similar to Bentham's 'panopticon' design, allowing guards to see all cell doors from a central place
  • Each prisoner had their own cell, which was well-ventilated with its own toilet and sink
  • Prisoners slept on a hammock
  • Cells lit by gas-light and heated by a large boiler in the basement, blowing hot air through a grill in the floor
• There were some teething problems with the new prison building as the sewers got blocked very quickly and the hot air blowing through the prison may have been responsible for a typhoid outbreak in 1851
• Victorian Prison chapel


  • One of the last surviving examples of this kind of prison chapel
  • Prisoners had their own stall and could only see the chaplain in the pulpit during services
  • Partitions in most prison chapels had been removed by the 1860s but survived in Lincoln because the prison was closed down in 1878