Debtors' jail highlight of UK museum
Source: Agencies |
October 31, 2009, Saturday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
BRITONS feeling the pinch in these hard times can take comfort from the fact that at least they cannot be jailed for owing money these days.
But before 1869, when imprisonment for debt was abolished, the outlook was grim indeed for the cash-crunched.
Just how grim is one of the themes in five new galleries opening next Spring in the Museum of London.
Curators have reassembled the original parts of a cramped wooden cell salvaged from the site of Wellclose Square debtors' prison - also known at the time as "The Sly House."
The structure was part of a small courthouse and house of correction used in the 1750s east of the Tower of London.
"People will be able to walk into it for the first time and experience what it was really like - prisoners scratched their names and pictures into the wooden walls," said Hollie Turner, one of the museum's curators.
The drawings include a hangman and street scenes thought to have been etched by inmates using pine cones.
An associated penal exhibit shows the original great iron doors of Britain's most feared jail: Newgate, which was demolished in the 1770s.
The new galleries span the period from the Great Fire of London in 1666 to the future and allow 7,000 more of the museum's treasures to be displayed, some for the first time.
They include a sword presented to Admiral Horatio Nelson for services to the nation, a painting of Christ's crucifixion by notorious East End gangster Ronnie Kray and an entire bronze lift used at leading London's department store Selfridges in the 1920s.
But before 1869, when imprisonment for debt was abolished, the outlook was grim indeed for the cash-crunched.
Just how grim is one of the themes in five new galleries opening next Spring in the Museum of London.
Curators have reassembled the original parts of a cramped wooden cell salvaged from the site of Wellclose Square debtors' prison - also known at the time as "The Sly House."
The structure was part of a small courthouse and house of correction used in the 1750s east of the Tower of London.
"People will be able to walk into it for the first time and experience what it was really like - prisoners scratched their names and pictures into the wooden walls," said Hollie Turner, one of the museum's curators.
The drawings include a hangman and street scenes thought to have been etched by inmates using pine cones.
An associated penal exhibit shows the original great iron doors of Britain's most feared jail: Newgate, which was demolished in the 1770s.
The new galleries span the period from the Great Fire of London in 1666 to the future and allow 7,000 more of the museum's treasures to be displayed, some for the first time.
They include a sword presented to Admiral Horatio Nelson for services to the nation, a painting of Christ's crucifixion by notorious East End gangster Ronnie Kray and an entire bronze lift used at leading London's department store Selfridges in the 1920s.
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