HMP Holloway
‘Surrounded by bare-limbed trees and grass verges covered in thick snow, the jail might have been a redbrick university faculty but for authoritarian signs in government-issue blue and white, and the sixteen-foot-high doors set into the wall so that prison vans might pass. Strike joined the trickle of visitors, several of them with children who strained to make marks in the untouched snow heaped beside the paths. The line shuffled together past the terracotta walls with their cement frets, past the hanging baskets now balls of snow in the freezing December air.’
Galbraith, Robert. The Silkworm: Cormoran Strike Book 2 (p. 349)
After it was opened in October 1852, its gothic architecture, complete with turrets and crenellations earned it the prison the nickname Holloway Castle. Many famous and infamous women were held here over the years. Law-breaking suffragettes went on hunger strike behind its walls before World War I and it was also the site of the last execution of a woman in Britain, Ruth Ellis, who died here in 1955, for the murder of her lover.
The prison was rebuilt in the 60s and 70s and the prison lost its turreted gatehouse, though the carved griffins which guarded the entrance were saved. When Strike visits, he passes instead between hanging baskets, now balls of snow in the freezing December weather. He sees Leonora, Quine’s wife, and in spite of the evidence against her, and her confusion and distress, he leaves into a London of wintery slush, more convinced than ever of her innocence.
Conditions in prison were condemned in various reports in the early 2000s, with problems blamed on lack of available funds. Holloway was closed in 2016 and the prison where Strike observed the damaged prisoners and visitors, eventually demolished to make way for new housing. The griffins were sent to the Museum of London, the fate of the foundation stone, which is inscribed ‘May God preserve the City of London and make this place a terror to evil doers’ is uncertain.
Holloway Prison has other literary connections. Oscar Wilde was imprisoned here for five weeks before it became a women and young offenders only prison, and Harriet Vane is held here during her trial in Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers.