The former Howard Chapel in Bedford recalls John Howard, campaigner for prison reform

The former Howard Chapel on Mill Street, Bedford … founded by the penal reformer and philanthropist John Howard (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

Patrick Comerford

In recent weeks, I have been visiting a number of churches in Bedford, including Saint Paul’s Church, the main church in the town centre, Saint Peter’s Church on Saint Peter’s Street in the De Parys area, Saint Cuthbert’s Church in the middle of a traffic island between Castle Road and Mill Street, the former Church of the Holy Trinity, now part of Bedford Sixth Form College; and the site of a long-disappeared mediaeval church, All Hallows’ Church.

But Bedford also has a strong nonconformist or dissenting tradition, and on Mill Street I visited two chapels that are integral parts of that tradition: Bunyan Meeting Church, associated with John Bunyan, and the former Howard Congregational Church, associated with the campaigner for penal reform, John Howard.

Howard Congregational Church, was built in 1774 under the patronage of John Howard and was rebuilt in 1849 and was last used for worship in 1971. The philanthropist and prison reformer John Howard (1726-1790) was a leading figure in 18th century life in Bedford, and his statue stands in a prominent place in Saint Paul’s Square, in front of Saint Paul’s Church.

John Howard was born in London in 1726, the son of a nonconformist City merchant. His mother died shortly after his birth and he was sent as a sickly child to the family home in Cardington, Bedfordshire, to be nursed by the wife of a tenant.

Howard’s father died when he was still a young man, leaving him with the Cardington estate and independent means. When he was 24, he suffered a dangerous illness and was nursed back to health by a woman 30 years older than him. He married her but she died three years later.

John Howard gave a gift of part of his garden to the Bunyan Meeting Church as a graveyard (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

On a visit to Portugal, Howard was captured and imprisoned by a French privateer. He was treated with such cruelty that he made up his mind to ease the sufferings of prisoners once he was freed.

Back in England, John Howard married again in 1758, when he married Henrietta Leeds from Croxton in Cambridgeshire. But Henrietta died in 1765 soon after giving birth to their child. Later, their son spent his last 13 years in an asylum in Leicester, and died in 1799.

John Howard worshipped regularly at the Independent Chapel in Bedford where John Bunyan had preached in the previous century. The Bunyan Meeting Church is between the house where Howard lived from 1765 to 1789 and the chapel he later founded. Howard gave a gift of part of his garden to the church as a graveyard, which is now a garden of remembrance, and he presented a new pulpit to the Bedford Meeting in 1770.

Two years later, however, the debate about infant baptism split the congregation. Howard, who favoured infant baptism, withdrew from the Bunyan Meeting Church in 1772. He gave £200 towards building what became known as the New Meeting or the Howard Meeting a few metres west along Mill Street, Bedford, in 1774.

Meanwhile, Howard became High Sheriff of Bedfordshire in 1773. Immediately, he began to inspect the conditions in Bedford Gaol, then at the junction of Silver Street and the High Street and once the place where John Bunyan was imprisoned. One biographer said Howard ‘was as eager to get into prisons as Bunyan was to get out’.

The prison had two dungeons, each 11 ft below ground, and both male and female prisoners shared a small exercise yard. Even a prisoner who was found not guilty had to pay 15s 4d to the gaoler and 2s to the turnkey to be released.

Howard spent his last 16 years campaigning to improve the conditions of prisoners. He continued to live in Cardington but spent much of his wealth and time travelling over 50,000 miles investigating the conditions of prisons across Britain and Europe.

The House of Commons heard his evidence on several occasions, and he published his State of the Prisons in England and Wales in 1777, and an Account of some Foreign Prisons.

He travelled to Russia in 1789 and was inspecting prisons in the Tsarist empire when he contracted typhus and died in Kherson in Ukraine on 20 January 1790. He was 63, and he was buried at Stepanovka. Howard’s estates eventually passed to Samuel Charles Whitbread, a grandson of his friend and relative Samuel Whitbread I.

Meanwhile, three years after Howard’s death, another schism divided Bunyan’s chapel or the Old Meeting in Bedford. The Revd Samuel Hillyard (1770-1839) from Olney became the minister at the Old Meeting in Bedford in 1790, and was ordained in 1792. But, because he was an Independent or Congregationalist, a number of the Baptist members of the Bunyan chapel left to found the Third Church of Bedford in Mill Lane in 1793.

John Howard lived on Mill Street, near the Bunyan Meeting Church, from 1765 to 1789 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

In time, the New Meeting founded by Howard on Mill Street in 1774 became known as the Howard Chapel. Daniel Millard was the architect of the new chapel, and it became a part of the Congregational Church.

The building was refronted and enlarged by John Usher (1822-1904) in 1849. It is a two-storey building with a stucco front, a recessed centre, a Doric portico, segmental headed windows on the ground floor, round arched windows on the first floor, and open pediments. A schoolroom and classrooms were added in 1862 to celebrate the 30 years of ministry of the Revd William Alliott. The chapel could seat 700 people.

The church had a youth club and a men’s forum in the 1950s. By the 1960s, however, the church had dwindling numbers, and the building was last used for worship in 1971. The majority of the remaining congregation joined Saint Luke’s Church in Saint Peter’s Street, an earlier amalgamation of older Presbyterian and Moravian churches.

The new body became Saint Luke’s United Church and a constituent member of the United Reformed Church in 1972. But Saint Luke’s closed for the last time as a church in 2008 and since 2015 it has been the Quarry Theatre.

There was a small burial ground around the former Howard Chapel on Mill Street. But the remaining headstones were moved from their original places and they placed up against the side walls.

The Howard Chapel stood as a derelict building throughout much of the 1980s and into the 1990s. It was later bought and became a nightclub. Its conversion to a nightclub was criticised in the local newspapers, not least because the gravestones around it were cleared away to the sides of the building.

It reopened as Cubana last December and claims to be the ‘biggest nightclub in Bedford’, although during the day it appears vacant. The name ‘Howard Chapel’ remains visible on the façade.

John Howard’s statue in Saint Paul’s Square, Bedford, by the sculptor Alfred Gilbert (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

John Howard’s statue in Saint Paul’s Square, Bedford, by the sculptor Alfred Gilbert (1854-1934) was erected in 1890 to mark the centenary of Howard’s death. The monument is about 20 ft (6.1 metres) high and is Grade I listed. It stands on the site of a fountain presented to the town by Thomas Wesley Turnley (1809-1875) in 1870 and demolished in 1880.

Howard’s statue was unveiled on 28 March 1894 by Herbrand Russell, 11th Duke of Bedford. Gilbert was a student of Sir Joseph Edgar Boehm, whose statue of John Bunyan is nearby. But Gilbert refused to attend, as he had done with the unveiling of the Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain (‘Eros’) in Piccadilly Circus, London, in 1893.

The Howard League for Penal Reform is named after John Howard, and he is also commemorated by a statue in Saint Paul’s Cathedral, London.

The Howard Memorial Church in Cardington, 4 miles south-east of Bedford, remains open and is affiliated to both the United Reformed Church and the Methodist Church.

The Howard Chapel became Cubana last December and claims to be the ‘biggest nightclub in Bedford’ (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

Quakers in Norwich have a 200-year-old meeting house and a history from the 1650s

The Quaker meeting house on Upper Goat Lane, Norwich, was built in 1826 … Quakers have been present in Norwich since the 1650s (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

Patrick Comerford

During the past week, I have been blogging about some of the cathedrals, churches and other places I visited when we were staying in Norwich last week. Charlotte and I were staying in Saint Giles House Hotel, and around the corner on Upper Goat Lane stands the 200-year-old Quaker meeting house.

The Gurneys of Earlham Hall were the most notable Quaker family in Norwich. Their banking business later amalgamated with other banks to form what is now Barclays Bank. Norfolk Quakers like Joseph Gurney, his sister Elizabeth Fry and their Anglican brother-in-law Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton were nationally conspicuous social reformers.

The religious and spiritual movements that led to the formation of the Religious Society of Friends in the mid 17th century grew out of the radical Puritans who were brought together by the founding Quaker George Fox (1624-1691). They sought a simpler form of Christian worship without clergy, churches or elaborate ritual.

The Society of Friends or Quakers first arrived in Norwich in the 1650s and for the next two decades Quakers met in private houses or in large open spaces such as Mousehold Heath to avoid detection by the authorities.

By 1676, Quakers in Norwich had raised enough money to buy a plot of land off what is now Upper Goat Lane, close to the junction with Pottergate, to build a meeting house.

The first meeting house on Upper Goat Lane was built in 1679. But it was another 10 years before the Act of Toleration extended to nonconformists the right to have their own places of worship. In the meantime, some meetings were held in the Norwich Gaol, where a number of Quakers had been imprisoned.

Friends also bought an acre of land to use as a Quaker burial ground in an area known as Gildencroft, about a mile to the north and just across the River Wensum. Today it remains the only cemetery still in use within the bounds of the old city walls.

By the end of the 17th century, Norwich had become one of the leading Quaker centres in England, with around 500 members in the city, and it became clear that a second meeting house was needed. This was built on a plot of land beside the Gildencroft burial ground and opened in 1699.

A plaque on the meeting house remembers the life and work of Elizabeth Fry (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

The novelist and poet Amelia (Alderson) Opie (1769-1853) was born in Norwich and was a childhood friend of the Gurney children. She married the portrait and history painter John Opie in 1798. Later she became a leading campaigner for the abolition of slavery. She was baptised in the Octagon Chapel, but later joined the Society of Friends and was buried in Gildencroft burial ground.

Elizabeth Gurney (1780-1850) attended the Goat Lane meeting in her younger days. She married Joseph Fry (1777-1861) in the meeting house in 1800, and is best remembered as Elizabeth Fry for her prison reforms.

The number of Quakers in Norwich continued to grow, and a new and larger meeting house was built on the site on Upper Goat Lane in 1826 to serve the new and different needs of what was then an evangelical meeting led by Friends such as Joseph Gurney of Earlham Hall.

The new meeting house was designed by the local architect and builder, John Thomas Patience of Holkham House. He became City Surveyor in Norwich 1836 and designed Lady Lane Methodist Chapel, the Roman Catholic chapel on Willow Lane and several public buildings in Norwich.

Access to the meeting house is through the ‘Long Room’ on the south side (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

The meeting house is a dignified building designed in the classical style with a handsomely-fitted interior. The new building had two meeting rooms, including a women’s meeting room, both galleried, and other accommodation.

The building had become a financial burden by the 1850s. Through the impetus of both the adult schools movement and mission work, additional land between the meeting house and Pottergate was bought in the 1860s for classrooms and a hall.

The need for much of this space had changed by the end of World War II and it was leased to other organisations. A lot of work was done on the meeting house in the 1940s and 1950s, and it was refurbished in 1987 under the direction of Peter Codling. The work included levelling main gallery and its conversion to a separate space.

The main building is rectangular on plan, with lower two-storey wings flanking a small forecourt enclosed by iron railings. The front walls are faced with white brick laid in Flemish bond with stone detailing. The side and rear walls are faced with red brick. The brickwork shows signs of modern repair, including concrete lintels over the large window openings of the rear elevation. The roofs are covered with slate.

The main elevation has a central doorway with a massive tetrastyle stone porch with unfluted Doric columns. The walls on either side of the porch are blind. Above the level of the porch, the front is filled with three large round-headed windows separated by pilasters rising to a plain entablature and cornice; the central bay is slightly set forward.

The side walls have four similar windows and the rear (west) wall has three windows, all set in sunk panels. The projecting wings have three-bay fronts to the courtyard with rectangular sashes below and square sashes above and a plain stone cornice and parapet. The single-bay elevations to Goat Lane have blind recessed panels with semi-circular yellow brick arches.

The meeting house is now generally entered through the single-storey corridor or ‘Long Room’ that runs the length of the south side of the building and fronts the car park.

Inside the Quaker Meeting House in Norwich

The main meeting room is a handsome tall rectangular space, lit by two large round-headed windows on each side and with a deep moulded plaster cornice. The walls are panelled in oak to head height, with timber benches against the walls, and there is an elders’ dais with fixed benches and a rail across the full width of the west wall.

Across the east wall are the timber Ionic columns of the gallery, which has been enclosed behind the column-line by timber and glass partitions. The gallery space has also been enclosed, but the original panelled gallery front remains, as do the original gallery stairs in the entrance foyer.

The women’s meeting house lies to the west, behind the dais of the main room. It is entered from the south side under a gallery. The walls are panelled in oak, but the benches along the walls are modern. The gallery rests on a pair of columns with simple block capitals. The space behind the columns has been in-filled and enclosed. The gallery itself remains open.

There are some timber benches in the main meeting room and elsewhere which follow the pattern of the benches on the elders’ dais, and may be original to the building.

There has never been a proper burial ground at Goat Lane, but by special arrangement the scattering of ashes has been allowed in the garden area on the south side of the meeting house.

A plaque commemorating the social reformer and campaigner Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

Two plaques on one of the front left-hand projecting wings commemorate Elizabeth Fry and her brother-in-law, Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton (1786-1845), the social reformer and campaigner against the death penalty and slavery.

Buxton was a member of the Church of England, he spoke regularly in the meeting house and also used Saint Andrew’s Hall to organise meetings supporting his causes.

He was educated at Trinity College Dublin. He lived at Northrepps Hall in Norfolk, and was a contemporary of the Revd Patrick Comerford Law (1797-1869), who was the Rector of Northrepps in 1830-1869.

The garden area on the south side of the meeting house (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

The architectural character of the area around Norwich Meeting House is mixed, with the mediaeval Church of Saint Gregory to the north, below Pottergate, a number of attractive old domestic buildings in Pottergate itself, and a brutalist multi-storey car park to the south. The open ground immediately south and west of the meeting house is used for car parking.

The building is listed at grade II* for both its architectural interest and its historical importance through associations with the Gurney family and others.

Although there may have been a few burials in the garden at Upper Goat Lane, the principal burial ground for Norwich Quakers has always been at Gildencroft on the edge of the city. Among those buried there in the early 19th century was Ishmael Bashaw, a Turkish merchant and refugee. His memoirs are thought to be the first book published in England by a Muslim.

Attendance at the Gildencroft meeting house gradually declined and it was leased to the local Baptist congregation in the late 19th century. The building was destroyed during World War II, during the German bombing raids on the nights of 27 and 29 April 1942.

Friends use the meeting house on Upper Goat Lane for about 10 hours per week, and the building is used for an average of 100 hours a week by local and community groups. Meetings for worship are held every Sunday morning from 10:45 to 11:45 and at lunchtime every Wednesday from 12:30 to 1 pm.

Meetings for worship are held in the Norwich meeting house every Sunday and Wednesday (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

Oxford Castle has survived neglect and civil war to become a museum and hotel

Oxford Castle dates back to a Norman castle of the motte and bailey type (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

Patrick Comerford

I first visited Oxford in my late teens, but I only visited Oxford Castle for first time almost 30 years later when I was visiting theological colleges in Oxford in 2007. The castle site was first opened to the public in 2002-2006, and I was visiting Wycliffe Hall and Ripon College, Cuddesdon, in 2007 when the Revd Lister Tonge, a future Dean of Monmouth who was then in chaplaincy in Oxford, took some time off to bring me to see Oxford Castle.

Oxford Castle is on the west side of central Oxford and close to the bus and train stations. I decided to have another look at the castle during a recent visit to Oxford, although it was a rainy day, and any castle climb was not going to be repaid with panoramic or merely clear views of what Matthew Arnold first called the ‘dreaming spires of Oxford.’

Nevertheless, the large, partly ruined mediaeval castle is an impressive site and building. Most of the original moated, wooden motte and bailey castle was replaced in stone in the late 12th or early 13th century.

The castle played an important role in the conflicts of the time, but most of it was destroyed in the English Civil War, and it later became a prison. When the prison closed in 1996, Oxford Castle was redeveloped as an hotel and visitor attraction.

The mediaeval remains of the castle including the motte, Saint George's Tower and crypt. The surviving rectangular Saint George’s Tower probably predates the remainder of the castle and may have been a watchtower associated with the original Saxon west gate of the city.

Oxford Castle was built by the Norman baron Robert D’Oyly (d’Oilly) the elder in 1071-1073. D’Oyly arrived in England with William the Conqueror, who granted him extensive lands in Oxfordshire.

D’Oyly built the castle to dominate the town. In time, he became the foremost landowner in Oxfordshire. He was made hereditary royal constable of Oxford Castle, although Oxford Castle is not recorded in the Domesday Book (1086). D’Oyly built his castle to the west side of the town, using the natural protection of a stream off the River Thames, now called Castle Mill Stream, and diverting the stream to form a moat.

Oxford Castle was an urban castle, overlying a portion of the Saxon town wall. The north gate of the wall is the Saxon tower now associated with the church of Saint Michael at the North Gate, while the west gate is occupied by the apparently Saxon tower of Saint George, incorporated into the fabric of the later Norman castle.

The initial castle was probably a large motte and bailey, copying the plan of the castle that D’Oyly had built 19 km away at Wallingford. The motte was originally about 18 metres (60 ft) high and 12 metres (40 ft) wide, built like the bailey from layers of gravel and strengthened with clay facing. There are suggestions that the bailey may have built first, using the pre-existing Saint George’s Tower as the first keep. This would mean that in its initial design the castle was a ringwork rather than a motte and bailey.

By the late 12th to early 13th century, the original palisade walls and wooden keep were replaced in stone. The new curtain wall incorporated Saint George’s Tower, the tallest of the castle towers, and now believed to have survived from late Saxon times.

The date of the remaining towers is uncertain, although many sources date the southernmost, round tower, of which the base still remains, to 1235. In at least one source, it is referred to as ‘Henry III’s Tower.’

Saint George’s Tower may be a Saxon building on the site of an earlier church (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

The buildings inside the walls included a chapel with a crypt attached to Saint George’s Tower, which may be on the site of an earlier church. The chapel originally had a nave, chancel and an apsidal sanctuary. It had a typical early Norman design, with solid pillars and arches.

D’Oyly and his close friend, Roger d’Ivry endowed a chapel with a college of priests in 1074. At an early stage, this chapel was dedicated to Saint George. The crypt of this chapel still survives, but in a new location within the castle: it was moved and rebuilt in 1794.

The ten-sided stone shell keep (18 metres, 58 ft) was built in the 13th century to replace an earlier wooden structure. It closely resembled those of Tonbridge Castle and Arundel Castles. The keep enclosed a number of buildings, leaving an inner courtyard only 7 metres (22 ft) across. Stairs inside the keep led down to an underground stone chamber, with an Early English hexagonal vault and a deep well providing water in times of siege.

Robert D’Oyly the younger, nephew of Robert D’Oyly the elder, had inherited the castle by the time of the civil war of the ‘Anarchy’ in the 1140s. After initially supporting King Stephen, Robert declared his support for Empress Matilda, Stephen’s cousin and rival for the throne. The Empress marched to Oxford in 1141 to base her campaign at the castle. Stephen responded by marching from Bristol in Autumn 1142, attacking and seizing Oxford and besieging Matilda in the castle.

Stephen set up two siege mounds beside the castle, called Jew’s Mount and Mount Pelham. On these mounds, which have since vanished, Stephen placed siege engines, and then waited for Matilda’s supplies to run low over the next three months.

Matilda, however, made good her escape from the castle in December. The popular version says she waited until the Castle Mill Stream was frozen over and then dressed in white as camouflage in the snow. She was lowered down the walls with three or four knights, and escaped through Stephen’s lines in the night as the king’s sentries tried to raise the alarm. On the other hand, William of Malmesbury suggests she escaped from one of the gates.

Matilda safely reached Abingdon-on-Thames and Oxford Castle surrendered to Stephen the next day. After the war, Henry D’Oyly, younger son of Robert D’Oyly, reclaimed the position of constable of Oxford Castle in 1154.

The castle was attacked again in the Barons’ War (1215-1217), prompting further improvements in its defences. Falkes de Breauté, who controlled many royal castles, demolished the Church of Saint Budoc south-east of the castle in 1220 and built a moated barbican to further defend the main gate. The remaining wooden buildings were replaced in stone, including the new Round Tower which was built in 1235.

King Henry III turned part of Oxford Castle into a prison (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

Henry III turned part of the castle into a prison to hold troublesome university clerks, and also improved the castle chapel, replacing the older barred windows with stained glass in 1243 and 1246. With Beaumont Palace nearby to the north of Oxford, however, the castle never became a royal residence.

The fortifications, particularly the castle gates and the barbican, were in poor condition by the 14th century, the castle lost much of its military value and strategic significance and fell into increasing disrepair, and the site was turned to use primarily for county administration and as a prison.

Henry IV was at Oxford Castle on 13 January 1400 for the trial of rebels who had taken part in the Epiphany Rising, or the Revolt of the Earls. They supported Richard II, Henry’s cousin who had been murdered by starvation.

The castle then became the centre for the administration of the county of Oxford, a jail, and a criminal court. The Assizes were held there until 1577, when plague broke out in what became known as the ‘Black Assize.’

‘Jail fever’ or typhus broke out during the trial of Rowland Jenks, ‘a saucy, foul-mouthed bookseller,’ and over 300 people died, including the Lord Lieutenant of Oxfordshire, two knights, 80 gentlemen, the entire grand jury for the session, and Sir Robert D’Oyley, a relative of the founder of the castle.

After that, assizes were never held at the castle.

A year later, a map of Oxford in 1578 shows the curtain wall, keep and towers remained, but the barbican had been demolished to make way for houses. The moat was almost entirely silted up by 1600, and houses had been built all around the edge of the bailey wall.

James I sold Oxford Castle to Francis James and Robert Younglove in 1611, and they in turn sold it to Christ Church in 1613. The college then leased it to a number of local families. But Oxford Castle was then in a weakened state, an a large crack ran down the side of the keep.

A map of the castle prepared for Christ Church in 1615 shows the keep on its mound, Saint George’s Tower with associated buildings and sections of the curtain wall remaining to the north and south, and the next tower to the south, plus a single remaining tower to the north-east, as well as the castle mill and a southern entrance to the castle complex. Houses and gardens had been laid out over more than half of the castle ditch or moat, which still contained water.

When the First English Civil War broke out in 1642, the Royalists made Oxford their capital. Parliamentary forces besieged Oxford in 1646, and the city was occupied by Colonel Richard Ingoldsby. He improved the fortification of the castle rather than the surrounding town, and in 1649 demolished most of the mediaeval stonework, replacing it with more modern earth bulwarks and reinforcing the keep with earthworks to form a gun-platform.

During the third English Civil War, the Parliamentary garrison pulled down these defences in 1652 and retreated to New College, causing great damage to the college in the process.

Oxford Castle served primarily as the local prison after the Civil War (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

After the Civil War, Oxford Castle served primarily as the local prison. The owners, Christ Church College, leased the castle to wardens who made their profit by charging prisoners for their board and lodging. The prison also had a gallows to execute prisoners.

For most of the 18th century, the castle prison was run by the Etty and Wisdom families and was in increasing disrepair. The keep was demolished early in the 18th century, when the top of the motte was landscaped into its current form.

The prison reformer John Howard visited the castle several times in the 1770s, and criticised its size and quality, including the extent to which vermin infested the prison. Partly in response to this criticism, the county authorities decided to rebuild Oxford Prison.

The castle was bought by the Oxford County Justices in 1785 and rebuilding began under the London architect William Blackburn. The wider castle site had already begun to change by the late 18th century: New Road was built through the bailey and the last parts of the castle moat was filled for building the new Oxford Canal terminus.

As the new prison was being built, the old chapel attached to Saint George’s Tower was demolished and part of the crypt was repositioned in 1794. The work was completed under Daniel Harris in 1805. As the new governor, Harris used convict labour from the prison to conduct early archaeological excavations at the castle with the help of the antiquarian Edward King.

The site continued to be developed in the 19th century. The new buildings included the new County Hall (1840-1841), built in the style of a toy castle, and the Oxfordshire Militia Armoury (1854). The prison was extended in 1876, growing to occupy most of the remaining space.

The inmates included children, the youngest being a seven-year-old girl sentenced to seven days hard labour in 1870 for stealing a pram. Prison reforms led to renaming the county prison as HM Prison Oxford in 1888.

The new Victorian buildings included the new County Hall, built in style of a toy castle (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

The prison was closed in 1996 and the site reverted to Oxfordshire County Council. The Oxford Prison buildings have since been redeveloped as a restaurant and heritage complex, with guided tours of the historic buildings and open courtyards for markets and theatrical performances.

The complex includes a hotel in the Malmaison chain, Malmaison Oxford, occupying a large part of the former prison blocks, with cells converted as guest rooms. However, the parts of the prison associated with corporal or capital punishment have been converted to offices rather than being used for guests.

The full extent of the original castle is somewhat obliterated today, especially with the intrusion of the newer County Hall into the east side, while New Road runs over the location of north-east portion of the curtain wall with its two square towers.

The remains of the original barbican lie underneath the modern Westgate shopping centre. The two oldest parts of the castle are Grade I listed buildings, and include: the 11th-century motte with its 13th-century well-chamber, Saint George’s tower, listed as Norman, but now believed to be Saxon, the relocated crypt chapel, and the 18th-century D-wing and Debtors’ Tower.

The castle complex today includes the Malmaison Oxford in a large part of the former prison blocks (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)