The Clink Prison Museum

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 Ba

nkside. 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.

It really is the sort of co-incidence that you might reasonably expect a prophetess of Mother Ursula Shipton’s standing ...
03/09/2026

It really is the sort of co-incidence that you might reasonably expect a prophetess of Mother Ursula Shipton’s standing to have foreseen and made much of – three of the major conclusions of the English Civil War (or the War of Three Kingdoms, if you prefer) happened on this day, separated by eight years, these being the Battles of Dunbar and Worcester in 1650 and 51 and the death of Oliver Cromwell in 1658.

The king that had started the war (Charles I) had been beheaded a year previously, and now his son (also named Charles) had returned from exile, been crowned king in Scotland, and was attempting to win back his country; in response, the English invaded Scotland, the two armies met at Dunbar and the Scots lost, retreating to Stirling before Sir David Leslie and Charles II marched their army south to rally support in England, but rallied insufficiently and were defeated at Worcester. The best that can be written about the adventure, which cost the lives of 1,000 people is that the king escaped and evaded capture, adopting various disguises and at one point (at Boscobel) hid in an oak tree while pursuing Roundheads (at least if you can believe Victorian accounts) walked unsuspectingly underneath.

Cromwell was the leading figure of a remarkable time, a struggling member of the very minor gentry, whose staunchly Protestant faith may have been the crutch that assisted him with his bipolar condition, and who became an MP in 1628. The Civil War was the making of him – he proved a highly effective and very fierce cavalry commander and, if not one of history’s greatest generals, at least better than those he was fighting. He was instrumental in the ex*****on of Charles I and, though he subsequently replaced him as head of state, he refused the crown – there never was a King Oliver – after his death, he was succeeded by his son Richard, who relinquished the role after a year, and Charles II was invited the restore the monarchy.

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Barely five minutes’ walk downriver of The Clink stands London Bridge and, if you stand on it and look over to your righ...
02/09/2026

Barely five minutes’ walk downriver of The Clink stands London Bridge and, if you stand on it and look over to your right you may, if you look hard, see a stone column with a golden urn of golden fire on the top of it – improbable enough even by the neo-classical standards of the age, but nothing to the bas relief at the base that depicts Charles II and his brother James dressed as Romans (complete with full-bottomed wigs) as they direct London’s recovery from the conflagration that resulted from whatever circumstance (and it was never proved what) that caused Thomas Farriner’s bakery to burn to the ground on this day in 1666, and the rest of London to go up with it.

The Great Fire of London burned for three days, destroying 10,000 buildings, including Old St Paul's Cathedral; having started close to Billingsgate, it blew steadily west in spite of all attempts to stop it, including chains of people with buckets of water and creating fire breaks by blowing up entire streets with gunpowder, but the city was tinder-dry from the hot summer, with the result that flames from the jettied upper storey on one side of the street could easily ignite that on the other. In two days, the fire had crossed the River Fleet (hoped to be a natural firebreak), and had got as far as Fetter Lane before finally being brought under control. Moorfields became a refugee camp, and King Charles feared rebellion.

The Clink and Bankside were initially unaffected by the blaze – diarist Samuel Pepys famously watched London burn from the window of what it now the Anchor Tavern (having previously buried a whole cheese in his garden for safe keeping) - but the knock-on effect was that Bankside became once more a builders’ supply dump for the re-building of the city, and that its notorious leisure industry that had provided The Clink with so many colourful prisoners down the centuries moved up west to Covent Garden.

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The longest reigning monarch in the world, the French King Louis the Fourteenth (72 years) died on this day fifteen year...
01/09/2026

The longest reigning monarch in the world, the French King Louis the Fourteenth (72 years) died on this day fifteen years into the Eighteenth Century, known as Le Roi Solleil – The Sun King - which, even by the flamboyant standards of the time, is hardly wearing royalty lightly. Of course, Seventeenth Century France wasn’t all about lovely clothes, precipitous wigs and Molliere plays, there was also very real skulduggery aimed at unseating Louis (who became king at the vulnerable age of four) and, when he grew up, one of his counter-measures was corralling the whole of the French aristocracy and nobility in the Palace of Versailles, so he could keep an eye on them – not so much a court as a beautifully appointed prison.

Less graciously immured however was ‘Monsieur Eustache Dauger’ (not his real name), held in four successive prisons (lastly the Bastille) in fact no-one (except possibly Louis XIV) knew his identity, since his face remained covered all of the time that he had company; whoever this obviously important political prisoner was, the name by which he is best known, thanks to Three Musketeers writer Alexandre Dumas (who, let’s face it, left no swash unbuckled) is The Man in the Iron Mask.

The rumour at Versailles was that two musketeers always stood guard, ordered to kill him if he uncovered his face – but this seems as imaginary as the iron mask – which was actually far more comfortable but equally opaque black velvet; speculation on his identity continues to this day, a favourite theory being that he was of royal blood, but so close to the king to be a real threat, and also too close to be killed (and Louis wasn’t famously squeamish!); suggestions have included Louis’s non-royal natural father, his elder brother (legitimate or otherwise), his twin brother or any other plausibly threatening political figure that had to disappear. The mystery man died in 1703 and was buried under the name of Marchialy, which wasn’t his real name either.

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There’s a noble literary tradition of naming characters like their natures – witness Severus Snape and Obidiah Slope (bo...
31/08/2026

There’s a noble literary tradition of naming characters like their natures – witness Severus Snape and Obidiah Slope (both played by Alan Rickman) - and it seems to go right back to medieval morality plays like Everyman, but the book that took the principle of everyone being named for one quality or trait and did it on steroids is Pilgrim’s Progress, by John Bunyan, the son of a Bedfordshire tinker. After three years boy-soldier service in the Civil War he returned home to his father’s trade, married, and became interested in religion, attending first the parish church and then the nonconformist Bedford Meeting, and became a Puritan preacher, but after the Restoration, freedom for nonconformists was curtailed.

In November 1660, Bunyan was warned of imminent arrest; he attempted no escape, and was sentenced to three months in the county gaol, with added transportation if he did not join the parish congregation and stop preaching – since he refused, he eventually served 12 years, bringing great hardship to his family, who had to rely on the Meeting’s charity and on what little Bunyan could earn making shoelaces. He, however, remained resolute in spite of seeing himself as ‘pulling down his house upon the head of his Wife and Children’. Less Puritan wives might have dumped him for the milkman at that moment.

In prison he started work on The Pilgrim's Progress and, in 1671, he was chosen as pastor of the Bedford Meeting. Religious toleration was increasing and, in March 1672, the king declared indulgence towards nonconformists. Thousands were released, including Bunyan - who immediately obtained a licence to preach. His later years (in spite of another shorter spell in prison), were spent in reasonable comfort as popular author and preacher. He died aged 59 today in 1688 after falling ill on a journey to London, and is buried in Bunhill Fields. The Pilgrim's Progress became one of the most published books in the English language; 1,300 editions having been printed by 1938, 250 years after his death.

30/08/2026

Long and hard had been the 1970s battle for Saturday tea time TV ratings, with ITV trying all kinds of cheap mummery like 3-2-1, Celebrity Squares, and Mind Your Language to scupper the BBC flagship Dr Who; about their best attempt was Dick Turpin starring the hitherto light comedy actor Richard O Sullivan as Turpin, and the very young and decorative Michael Deeks as his sidekick Swift Nick, rough-edged heroes, happy to spare time from their busy schedule of armed robbery to support the poor, help hapless fops get the girl, save innocents from the rope and were always, always courteous to ladies; what a shock then, when the BBC (unsportingly) transmitted their own documentary about Turpin, which took every supposed ‘fact’ and held it up to history.

Turpin, it turned out, had been a seedy, pockmarked crook with a nasty streak as wide as the Great North Road; starting as a butcher, progressing via jointing poached deer, to the Gregory Gang, house-invading and terrifying the occupants into paying up – a particularly nasty heist involved the torture of a 70-year-old farmer and the r**e of his maid servant – Turpin featured in a woodcut of him throwing an old lady onto a fire. He shot a keeper named Tom Morris, who’d recognised him, then he adopted the name John Palmer and took to horse thieving – which finally got his neck stretched – he might have done some highway robbery on the side.

The heroic Turpin legend owes most to Harrison Ainsworth and his novel Rookwood, and the TV series much too; it was rumbustious with a capital rum, rich in period tang, peopled with a collection of rapscallions and harlots straight out of Hogarth, in particular Christopher Benjamin as a gouty Sir John Glutton and David Daker as the shouty Captain Spiker – it was also highly historically and politically literate about the issues of its day, and has stood the test of time remarkably well.

Click this link to watch the first episode – there is more on You Tube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8beJPDqpQ4

On a chilly Edinburgh evening in 1696, twenty-year-old Thomas Aikenhead was walking with three other medical students wh...
29/08/2026

On a chilly Edinburgh evening in 1696, twenty-year-old Thomas Aikenhead was walking with three other medical students when he remarked that at that moment he would prefer to be in Hell, where at least he would be warm – for this he was arrested for blasphemy; the law said that any person who “shall in their writing or discourse, deny, impugn or quarrel, argue or reason, against the being of God, or any of the persons of the blessed trinity, or the authority of the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, or the providence of God in the government of the world” was subject to imprisonment for the first two offences, and death for the third.

Aikenhead was brought to trial in Edinburgh in December 1696. Five of his supposed friends testified against him, reporting not only his quip about Hell, but also that Aikenhead had claimed that the Bible was composed of fables and that theology was nonsense, that he scoffed at the doctrines of the trinity and the incarnation, and that he had said he preferred Muhammed to Christ: Hearing the evidence, the court found Aikenhead guilty of blasphemy and sentenced him to death.

Aikenhead, who was representing himself, filed an appeal to the Scottish Privy Council, apologizing for his impiety, professing his repentance, pleading his ‘tender years’, and that it was only his first offense. Unpersuaded of his sincerity, the Privy Council deferred to the Kirk. Rather than request clemency, the Church of Scotland demanded that the ex*****on proceed, in order to ‘curb the abounding of impiety and profanity in this land’. Sentence was affirmed. After being forced to walk the two miles from his cell to the gallows, Thomas Aikenhead was hanged on January 8, 1697. He became the last person to be executed for blasphemy in Great Britain.

With a cushion on his head for a crown, and a dagger for a sceptre, one of the most appalling scoundrels of London prete...
28/08/2026

With a cushion on his head for a crown, and a dagger for a sceptre, one of the most appalling scoundrels of London pretends to be King Henry IV, and describes his real self as ‘A goodly portly man, i' faith, and a corpulent’ (the man is as fat as butter!) ‘Of a cheerful look, a pleasing eye, and a most noble carriage’ (With *his* gout?) ‘And, as I think, his age some fifty, or, by'r Lady, inclining to threescore’ (Seventy, if he’s a day, and quite old enough to know a lot better!) ‘And now I remember me, his name is …’ (a pause that the fat knight himself could galliard through) ‘Falstaff!’

A stranger to every virtue, Shakespeare’s Sir John Falstaff, possibly based on Sir John Oldcastle, Sir John Fastolfe, the playwright Robert Green, or a mixture of all three, stands as one of the comic giants of theatre; wanting every scruple and a lover only of sack, food, doxies and other people’s money. He is a self-serving, bibulous, backsliding fraud, who also happens to be great company – invite Falstaff to your house party by all means, but be prepared for him to eat all the pies, steal the silver spoons, and impregnate your cook.

Although also visiting Windsor to set his cap at the Merry Wives, having his death reported in Henry V, and his possible grandson appearing in Henry VI I, Falstaff’s finest hours are in Henry IV (part one particularly) in which he serves as anti-mentor to Hal, Prince of Wales, leading him into as much mischief as possible at the Boar’s Head Tavern in Eastchepe. Though the two have a profound bond, their friendship cannot survive Hal’s coronation, and Falstaff and company are marched off to the Fleet Prison (whether or not they get there!). Eastchepe remains, but the last of the Boar’s Head was demolished in 1831. The real Henry V – not nearly as nice as Shakespeare’s Hal – died at the end of August in 1422, aged 35.

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Torture is a dark practice, obscured by the smoke and mirrors of history – or, less poetically, by torturers hiding the ...
27/08/2026

Torture is a dark practice, obscured by the smoke and mirrors of history – or, less poetically, by torturers hiding the evidence – to hazard a guess at peaks of English torture, we sought times when the realm felt especially imperilled, as when an understandably paranoid Henry VII set up The Court of Star Chamber that explicitly could order torture, and his granddaughter Elizabeth issuing more warrants for it than any other English monarch – but all with rules, you will observe, rather than the earlier state of affairs during the civil war between King Stephen and his cousin Empress Matilda (when the Clink was founded) when there weren’t.

The war has become known as The Anarchy, and it really was the case that, if your local lord inclined, he could have you dragged out of bed at 3am, pronounced guilty of something or other and then hanged from the tree in your garden – and that was law – and it was in response to this (rather as if shouting ‘OK, everyone – Time Out!’) that Stephen’s successor, Henry II brought in laws about arrest and trial – broadly speaking if you were arrested they had to tell you what for, or the king would make them release you – and they had to give you a trial, with a jury if you wanted one so, if you wound up in the dock with a thick ear and a broken nose, one of the twelve good men and true was likely to think ‘Tortured’ and you’d get a ‘Not Guilty’ as quick as you like.

This arrangement places the onus not to torture very firmly on the prosecution and, while it’s not remotely cheat-proof, it’s much better to have it than not, but the principle behind Henry’s law appears be ‘I will not torture my loyal subjects’ which implies a terrible codicil for any subject whose loyalty falls into doubt – anyone that threatens national security is no longer a loyal subject so, at that point, torture’s OK again (note the use of present tense).

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It’s strange no-one seems to have asked at the time, but if the devil, the Lord of Flies, the Great Beast whose name is ...
26/08/2026

It’s strange no-one seems to have asked at the time, but if the devil, the Lord of Flies, the Great Beast whose name is Dagon, the greatest Duke of Hell, the Eternal Antichrist and Adversary of God really was prosecuting Armageddon in the autumn of 1645, why didn’t he recruit an army of fit, strong young men (who are great at getting up to devilry) rather than a few old women? But, with civil war dividing the nation, the town council of Great Yarmouth were prepared to accept aged ladies as agents of Satan, because a lawyer from Maningtree, now styling himself ‘Witchfinder General’ said so – it was Matthew Hopkins.

The council begged him to ‘discover and find out’ their witches and, following spiteful whisperings and pointed fingers, Elizabeth Bradwell, along with ten others, was arrested, accused of cursing her neighbours and poisoning the land with sin and malevolence, and tried on the 10th September. She confessed to image magic – the creation of wax likenesses of her enemies, and recalled that she thrust a nail into the head of a wax model of a neighbour’s child. She further confessed that she secured her diabolical gifts by signing, in her own blood, a contract given to her by the Devil from his ‘black book’. Hopkins was intrigued; this was not mere solitary crone English witchery – contracts smacked of the underground satanic army that worked assiduously and in secret to the destruction of Christendom, and was widely whispered about on the continent – where could she have got that idea if it wasn’t true?

Compelling, if we accept the view of East Anglia as a cultural backwater of fens and isolation, but any visitor to Norfolk today will see just how much land has been reclaimed, over the centuries, from the sea; the expertise to do this was not home grown, but imported from a region with significant land reclamation already – Flanders. It really didn’t need the Devil to bring continental ideas to Norfolk.

On this day in 1609 astronomer Galileo Galilei demonstrated his first telescope to Venetian lawmakers and managed, throu...
25/08/2026

On this day in 1609 astronomer Galileo Galilei demonstrated his first telescope to Venetian lawmakers and managed, through the protection of the Medicis, to get away with implying (by things like evidence and maths) that the earth wasn’t the centre of the universe after all but, by 1633, he was in trouble again and put on trial. Galileo said that one may hold and defend an opinion as probable after it has been declared contrary to Holy Scripture but, after being threatened with physical torture he was found guilty, and the sentence of the Inquisition, issued on 22 June 1633, was that he was required to abjure, curse, and detest’ his opinions, to live under house arrest, and publication of his works (including any future ones) was banned.

Legend has it that, after his abjuration Galileo muttered ‘and yet it moves’, but the first mention of this seems to be about a century after he died. The phrase is in a painting by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo of an imprisoned Galileo pointing to the words written on his dungeon wall. After a period with the friendly Archbishop Piccolomini in Siena, Galileo was allowed to return to his villa at Arcetri near Florence, where he spent the rest of his life under house arrest. He continued his work on mechanics, and in 1638 he published a scientific book in Holland. His standing would remain questioned at every turn. He died in 1642, and the age of 77.

However, partially in tribute to Galileo, the first academy devoted to the new experimental science, the Accademia del Cimento, was formed at Arcetri, which is where Francesco Redi performed controlled experiments, and many other important advancements were made which would eventually help usher in The Age of Enlightenment. It took 359 years for Pope John Paul II to formally apologized for the wrongs done to Galileo.

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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