The Clink Prison Museum

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The Clink Prison Museum Attraction, Museum Owned by the Bishop of Wi******er, The Clink Prison was used to control the riverside part of Southwark known as “The Liberty of The Clink”.
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The Clink Prison Museum stands upon the original site of the Clink Prison, which dates back to 1144 making it one of England’s oldest, if not the oldest prison. Visitors discover a hands-on educational experience allowing them to handle original and reproduction artifacts, including torture devices, as well as the opportunity to view and hear the amazing stories of the inmates and the notorious Bankside. This area housed much of London’s entertainment establishments including inns, theatres, bull and bear-baiting, c**k and dog fighting and twenty two houses of atrocious but very wide repute - much of this lives on today in the street names of Bankside. The Clink Prison was a small but crucial part of the bishop's riverside palace, called Wi******er House. where he often hosted royal functions and drew the envy of kings. Parts of the Great Hall still stand today, including the world famous Rose Window, preserved by English Heritage. The list of famous names that have visited Bankside during the years of The Clink includes Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, Henry VIII, William Shakespeare, Sir Francis Drake, James I, Samuel Pepys, Dr Johnson and many more, why not join them and explore the prison that gave its name to all others? The Clink Prison.

Marie, archduchess and youngest daughter of the former Duke of Lorraine, the elected Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, w...
16/10/2026

Marie, archduchess and youngest daughter of the former Duke of Lorraine, the elected Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, was born into such riches to be able to suck a different silver spoon every day of the year, and was packed off to France at the age of 14 to marry Louis the Dauphin, became queen aged 19 and, while initially popular, her imprudent spending and her economic mismanagement of the country made her an emblem of privilege utterly at odds with The Age of Reason and, even before a slew of published libels accusing her of all manner of debaucheries (the king being supposedly impotent). ‘The Austrian Woman’ became an unofficial title – or ‘Austrian Bitch’.

It's interesting to consider the way that we view the revolution and the many, many deaths that resulted; in that we can be reasonably philosophical about the various revolutionaries that got overtaken by political ideas - Hebert, Danton, even Robespierre himself (and, of course Marat, stabbed in his bath) – and to feel some sympathy for the many aristocrats and King Louis, whatever their purblind extravagance, hapless undignified figures in a long, dismal parade to the chop, but Marie Antionette, guillotined today in 1793, cannot escape some sympathy for the manner of her death, not least because she was, by then, a widow – she was required to dress in front of her guards, her hair was shorn, a rope leash put round her neck and she was taken to her death in a cart – an hour long journey being cat-called and jeered at.

‘Let them eat cake’ is the reply most famously and falsely attributed to Marie (Rousseau wrote it before Marie ever got to France) and she and her friends didn’t dress up like Arcadian shepherdesses (with specially shampooed sheep) to play at being poor either, but she became a potent focus for revolutionary anger, and it is worth wondering if the revolution would have happened at all without her – Thomas Jefferson doubted it – but for Marie Antionette, France might (just possibly!) have a royal family to this day.

Because of Jack Sheppard’s jailbreaks, Newgate had been ‘strengthened’, making Daniel Malden the more remarkable. Cante...
15/10/2026

Because of Jack Sheppard’s jailbreaks, Newgate had been ‘strengthened’, making Daniel Malden the more remarkable. Canterbury-born, previously RN, and condemned for stealing linen at Islington in 1736, Malden was ordered to hang on 24 May but, that morning (advised by his cells previous occupant), he levered up a floor plank with a stool leg, dropped into the cell below, got through the bars into the pressyard and, via chapel and warden's house, to the roofs, down through the window of an empty garret and, wrapping his irons close to his legs with rags as if he were lame, out the kitchen window, and off home to Nightingale Lane.

Recaptured not a week later, he was doubly loaded with irons in the ‘old condemned hold’. Seeming ‘very well secured’ when Austin the keeper fed him, evening of Sunday 13th - a few hours later, he had used a knife to lever open the chain staple, then burrow through his floor, whereat he dived (narrowly escaping sticking fast), into the prison sewer – dragging a hundred pounds of chain. (Pursuers found the bodies of two suffocated escapers). After two days, Malden emerged in a yard behind Christ's Hospital, stinking, gashed and exhausted, and had reached ‘Little Britain’, before a friend bought him a pot of b**r and found a smith to remove his chains.

By 26 June, rumour had Malden taken at Reading, but he got to Harwich, via Enfield, and sailed to Flushing, where he nearly joined the army, but preferred to return to England ‘to find his wife.’ In September he was taken at Canterbury (working as groom or jockey), and brought to London (the streets thronged with onlookers) handcuffed, his legs chained under the horse, and guarded by forty horsemen. He was chained, constantly watched, to the Newgate floor. Re-sentenced on this day, he begged earnestly for transportation, having ‘worked honestly at Canterbury, and done no robbery since last June’, but was hanged at Tyburn in November.

The ladies of the night (or ‘women of the town’, to be polite) around Bloomsbury were known to exaggerate, and it was to...
14/10/2026

The ladies of the night (or ‘women of the town’, to be polite) around Bloomsbury were known to exaggerate, and it was to this that Mary Vincent and her husband attributed the cry of ‘Murder!’ around ten to six tomorrow morning in 1775, before Mary raised the sash and saw two men fighting fiercely in Silver Street. The taller fought to get free, then ran away towards Holborn. The other got up and attempted to pursue him, but fell after about eight or ten steps, got up again, managed three or four yards, cried ‘Mistress, he has murdered me’ and fell again; by that time some of the neighbours were out, including John Ealand the butcher in just his shirt. There lay Stubbins, Mr Pratt’s coachman, and he had been stabbed.

A little later, John French a watchman of Seven Dials, stood at the end of Queen Street, listening to the clock strike six, and saw a man running up very fast without a hat or wig; ‘You must be a madman’, he said, in the proper tradition of judicial dramatic irony, ‘to run about the streets at this time of the morning without your hat or wig’. Meanwhile, Mr Younge, the surgeon of Great Russell Street, was fetched to Stubbins, but to no avail, the coachman died two hours later, after writhing in such pain on the way to the hospital as to have kicked out one of the windows of the sedan chair. He said the murderer had broken into his house to rob the stable.

A wig, a coat and a bayonet (bent) were found by the place Stubbins fell, and the wig was recognised, by hairdresser Lawrence Robinson, as being one he had altered for rabbit seller Robert Williams. Sir John Fielding himself sent John French to Newgate Prison to identify Williams as the man without a hat or wig. Being convicted of murder, he was hanged at Tyburn the following January.

‘Why, I would sail you all the way up to Ex*****on Dock, so I would!’ is one of the thoroughly false affirmations of loy...
13/10/2026

‘Why, I would sail you all the way up to Ex*****on Dock, so I would!’ is one of the thoroughly false affirmations of loyalty sworn by Israel Hands, coxswain of the Hispaniola in Robert Louis Stephenson’s superb tale of maritime skulduggery, Treasure Island, which established the idiom of wooden legs, parrots, shivering timbers, and the Black Spot for piratical posterity, with Hands the only real-life pirate aboard. That the treacherous dog turns on Jim Hawkins soon after should be no surprise to anyone since Ex*****on Dock was the last place a pirate would want to be seen alive – since it very probably would be the last place that he was - the dock symbolised that jurisdiction of the Admiralty over all sea crime, standing just beyond the Thames low-tide mark.

Mutiny resulting in death, murders on the High Seas, and so**my could all get you locked in the Marshalsea Prison and then paraded across London Bridge and past the Tower of London to be hanged. The procession was led by the High Court Marshal carrying a silver oar that represented the Admiralty. An ex*****on at the dock usually meant that crowds lined the river's banks or chartered boats moored in the Thames to get a better view. Pirates were hanged with a shortened rope, the drop being insufficient to break the neck, resulting in slow asphyxia as they did the ‘Marshall’s Dance’, kicking in mid-air. Corpses were left until at least three tides had washed over their heads.

The infamous pirate, Captain Kidd was executed at the dock in 1701 (at a second attempt, since the rope broke the first time!) and his body gibbeted at Tilbury. The exact location of the dock is in some doubt, though the Prospect of Whitby seems to lay a claim, and the pub is clearly depicted aa adjacent the dock in Bjorn Larsson’s superb (fictitious!) ‘autobiography’ of Long John Silver, with Israel Hands (who Silver describes as contemptibly stupid) serving behind the Prospect bar.

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America is very important in the story of The Clink and, on this day in 1492, Christopher Columbus discovered it – that ...
12/10/2026

America is very important in the story of The Clink and, on this day in 1492, Christopher Columbus discovered it – that is to say, he sailed to it and claimed it for his Spanish paymasters. The Vikings had apparently discovered it first, but even that doesn’t count the people that lived there already, and they were very kind to Columbus’s near-starving sailors. The main fear among these wasn’t sailing off the edge of the world – they knew it was round – rather they were scared of running out of vittles – and they nearly did. Columbus repaid the native population by enslaving them and stealing their gold. After an eventual enquiry into the whole sorry business, he was relieved of his governorship, and spent the rest of his life trying to claim a portion of royal profits from the new land.

In 1620 it was decided to send members of England’s Separatist Church to America, one of whom, minister and Clink inmate John Lothrop sailed on the Griffin in 1634, and is now the ancestor of six US presidents, as well as numerous congresspersons, movie stars, poets, at least one Old West gunslinger and (regrettably) a traitor of the American Revolutionary War.

Another concern is that The Clink might still be standing – it’s final location was on Park Street, just behind what it now Shakespeare’s Globe – had America not gained its independence in 1776; the poor prosecution of the war to retain it had already holed Lord North’s deeply unpopular premiership, so London was in a fractious mood, and his law reforms that allowed Irishmen into the British Army and Catholics to have churches amounted to cause the Gordon Riots in which Gordon’s supporters, shouting things like ‘They come over here, they eat funny food, the go to a funny church and they do all the jobs that we didn’t want anyway!’ set fire to Newgate Prison, the Bank of England and The Clink, which burned to the ground.

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Though very close to The Globe Theatre, The Clink doesn’t feature in any of Shakespeare’s plays, though the events descr...
11/10/2026

Though very close to The Globe Theatre, The Clink doesn’t feature in any of Shakespeare’s plays, though the events described in Henry VI part 2 do get remarkably close! In spite of being classified by Alexander Armstrong’s TV show as ‘Pointless’ the Henry VI plays are lots of skulduggerous medieval fun, dealing with the story of the Wars of the Roses over 12 blood-spattered hours, and the second part (featuring trail by combat, witchcraft and pirates) is particularly good; the plot deals on the fall from power of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, who had been running the country in the name of the young Henry VI, but was displaced in 1447 by his arch rival the scheming Cardinal Beaufort, Bishop of Wi******er. Humphrey was arrested for treason and died in prison – Beaufort died shortly afterwards.

This left a massive power vacuum around the king, which was swiftly filled by a clique composed of the queen, Margaret D’Anjou, The Duke of Suffolk and the Duke of Exeter plus others, and it was Exeter who had a machine called The Rack installed in the Tower of London. This was significant - The Rack was a clear and potent threat to anyone that might think of opposing the Lancastrian royal family - and they were not without vocal critics. In 1450 a mob of rebels led by the pretender, Jack Cade, tried to take London and place Cade on the throne.

‘First let’s kill all the lawyers!’ is the famous shout from rebel Dick the Butcher (and the mob make two decapitated heads kiss at street corners – yuk!), but Cade’s Rebellion failed – and there were so many subsequent beheadings that there were insufficient spikes on London Bridge to display all the results. Presumably to hold rebel prisoners, a new prison annexe was built at the western extremity of the palace – where the Clink Prison Museum now stands – this building was in use as a prison for 295 years, and it was here that it got named The Clink.

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The term ‘Dread King’ might inspire speculation; what might make people particularly dread a king? Perhaps his capacity...
10/10/2026

The term ‘Dread King’ might inspire speculation; what might make people particularly dread a king? Perhaps his capacity to cause unimaginable suffering and, considering very the basic technology required to stretch a body, producing excruciating pain, racking may very well have been in use for a very long time before its first recorded application in Greece 356BC. That built in the Tower of London at the orders of John Holland, 2nd Duke of Exeter, in 1447 to terrify anyone opposed to the Lancastrian regime (‘What have the Lancastrians ever done for us...?), was an oak frame containing two axles, turned by levers and held fast by ratchets. It was most extensively employed during the reigns of Henry VIII and particularly Elizabeth I.

Contrary to Victorian myths, use was rare, strictly by royal instruction – and never, ever were arms pulled off - that would certainly kill the subject and, not only are corpses famously taciturn, you can’t publicly execute them afterwards. Priest-hole architect extraordinary, Nicholas Owen died on the rack in 1606 – much against his torturers’ intentions

The last victim of the Tower rack may have been Edmond Peacham in 1615. Although Charles I ordered the racking of a Catholic priest in Ireland in 1627, English judges ruled it illegal to rack assassin John Felton in 1628 (even if he had killed the king’s best friend). While Miles Prance, a suspect in the Berry Godfrey Murder, was threatened with racking in 1679, it wasn’t used.

The rack had been removed from the Tower and destroyed by the end of the Seventeenth Century; today’s picture is of the Tower’s replica, made by local blacksmith, Kevin Boys. Kevin also made the 1/6 scale model displayed in The Clink – it’s just the right size for Action Man. One day a girl in a visiting school party said ‘I know someone that could go on that and be perfectly OK’, when our tour guide expressed disbelief and disapproval; she happily produced from her schoolbag a Stretch Armstrong toy.

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It is always important, when engaged on any criminal enterprise, to have a ready, innocent and plausible explanation for...
09/10/2026

It is always important, when engaged on any criminal enterprise, to have a ready, innocent and plausible explanation for your villainy ready to trip off the tongue, so as to avoid saying anything as unlikely as ‘I dunno’, which is what gravedigger John Holmes came out with when a man named Eustanton asked him what was in the sack he was carrying on this night in 1777. There really have been greater moments of criminal accomplishment. Mr Eustanton and his friends were instantly suspicious of Holmes (and his assistant, Robert Williams) – who turned out to be London’s first discovered body snatchers.

The rising urban population meant a need for more doctors, and greater medical understanding meant that there was more to teach them - and more to inspire further discovery – hence the need for cadavers for dissection and, since the supply was legally restricted to those convicted of murder but not ordered to be gibbetted, another old criminal law came into play – that of restricted supply equalling extra-judicial opportunity! By the time the 1832 Anatomy Act supplied workhouse corpses for the dissection tables, London’s teaching surgeons each had their own supply very discretely arranged, but even then, women’s corpses were the rarer, and those of fit, healthy young men more sought after still.

Mr Eustanton and his friends were possibly a little worse for drink, and they decided to look in the sack for themselves. At this Mr Holmes began to beg that he was just a poor man coming home from the harvest, which did not dissuade them one bit; opening the sack they found the emaciated body of Mrs Jane Salisbury, late of the churchyard at St George the Martyr, Queen Street, Bloomsbury, where it had been Mr Holmes’ office to protect her peaceful rest. Tried before Sir John Hawkins at the Guildhall, Holmes and Williams were jailed for six months and sentenced to be whipped over the half mile between Kingsgate Street to Dyott Street, St Giles – though those were later remitted.

The question of discipline in schools remains something of a vexed one in some quarters, with Thomas Hughes' book Tom Br...
08/10/2026

The question of discipline in schools remains something of a vexed one in some quarters, with Thomas Hughes' book Tom Brown’s Schooldays providing such vivid accounts of junior boys being flogged, tossed in blankets and roasted in front of fires, and such rich inspiration for not only George Macdonald Fraser’s monumental Flashman Papers, but also Michael Palin and Terry Jones’ rascally romp ‘Tompkinson’s Schooldays’, in which the boys of Greybridge might be made to fight the school leopard, be cast in a sack onto the school maggot pit, or (on St Tadger’s Day) nailed to the school gates. While that was at public school of course, in the year of transmission (1976) it was still perfectly legal and widely accepted for teachers in schools to hit children with canes, wooden bats, or (seriously!) lengths of skirting board – and would remain so for the next ten years.

When the satirical Not The Nine O Clock News (1980) featured a sketch about a headmaster (played by Rowan Atkinson), righteous in his defence of having caned a boy to death, it was presumably innocent of the very real indictment made against schoolmaster, Mr John Barney, today in 1770 that he had actually killed one of his pupils, William Poole, by banging his head against the classroom chimney breast for his inability to read aloud in class – three other pupils had affirmed this in court – William had cried out that his head hurt then had run out to be sick. He then died during the night.

Post mortem examination by one Dr Hunter discovered a shard of bone the size of a sixpence ‘twisting into the brain’ and, given the thinness of children’s skulls and the sharpness of the breast corner, it would not have taken very much force to cause this. John Barney was deeply contrite; ‘Had he been my own son, I could not have taken greater pains with him. I loved him’ – he was acquitted, with an apparently broken heart.

Hey Teachers! Looking for a unique class outing? Are you immersed in the study of crime and punishment this term? Step i...
08/10/2026

Hey Teachers! Looking for a unique class outing? Are you immersed in the study of crime and punishment this term? Step into medieval London and experience history like never before and immerse yourself in a trove of information on medieval torture, treason, and imprisonment at The Clink! If you're planning to visit with a group of 10 or more, consider reserving a self-guided or guided tour to vividly recount the shadowy chapters of London's history.
Reach out to [email protected] for additional details.

Address

1 Clink Street
London
SE19DG

Opening Hours

Monday 10am - 7:30pm
Tuesday 10am - 6pm
Wednesday 10am - 6pm
Thursday 10am - 6pm
Friday 10am - 7:30pm
Saturday 10am - 7:30pm
Sunday 10am - 7:30pm

Telephone

+44 20 7403 0900

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