Crime and Punishment

This picture shows the front court of the old prison in School Gardens . A man can be seen escaping from the prison through the roof. In the courtyard there is also a lot of activity. One prisoner is locked to a post with a loaf of bread which he stole from another inmate. In the foreground a woman is selling vegetables and a highwayman can be seen slipping a letter into a woman's pocket. The picture also shows a pickpocket at work.

This prison was condemned in 1785 and John Hiram Haycock was commissioned to design the new Shrewsbury Prison , or Salop Prison as it was originally known.

William Blackburn, an architect who designed many prisons, also played a part in drawing up the plans for the new prison. It was Blackburn who chose the site on which the prison is built. Blackburn was influenced by the ideas of John Howard. Howard was a prison reformer who had suggested various ways in which the sanitary conditions of English prisons could be improved. These measures formed part of the 1774 Gaol Act. Howard visited Shrewsbury in 1788 to inspect the plans for the new prison. He disliked some aspects of the designs, such as the size of the interior courts. As a result, redesigns were undertaken by Thomas Telford. Telford had been given the position of clerk of works at the new prison the previous year.

Shrewsbury Prison was finished in 1793. The bust above the gatehouse of the prison is of John Howard himself, who also gives his name to Howard Street where the prison is located. Howard died three years before the prison was completed after contracting typhus whilst visiting a Russian military hospital at Kherston.

In 1877 an act of Parliament saw all prisons being transferred to the control of the Home Office. Prior to this most prisons were owned and controlled locally by both county and borough magistrates. Soon afterwards the interior of Shrewsbury Prison was completely remodelled.