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.

This afternoon in 1780, the mood in London was ugly and the attention of the mob, angry at the high handed ‘Do as I say,...
02/06/2026

This afternoon in 1780, the mood in London was ugly and the attention of the mob, angry at the high handed ‘Do as I say, not as I do’ attitude of Lord North’s government, and the masterly inactivity of George III, and as angry at both as the Americans were, even though they were angry at the outcome of the war with America as well, had focused on the homes of immigrant Irish families around Moorfields (now Finsbury Square – just north of Moorgate underground station), and leading Irish citizen James Malo had petitioned the Lord Mayor to do something to prevent nocturnal violence and bloodshed; his worship declined to get involved. As night fell, the mob fell upon Moorfields.

After some hours of bloody confrontation, a phalanx of about half the aggressors moved off west, getting as far as the Mansion House before they broke into the Bank of England and set fire to it, before continuing on the same direction, and laying siege to Newgate Prison, breaking in, setting the prisoners free and then setting the building on fire.

Meanwhile another party of rioters had crossed London Bridge and arrived at The Clink, by then a house on Park Street, behind the site of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, and broke into it; they let all the prisoners free and then burned the building to the ground. Their work done, they turned back towards the bridge, but paused at the brewery demanding refreshment. Perkins the brewer, doubtless mindful of the damage the rioters might do to his casks and tuns, gave them both beer and beef, before they went on their way.

The Gordon Riots lasted 7 nights and claimed 700 lives – some deaths were attributed to alcoholic poisoning - about 285 were shot dead, and between 20 and 30 were tried and executed. Gordon was arrested and charged with high treason but was acquitted. Brackley Kennet the Lord Mayor, was convicted of criminal negligence and fined £1,000. The Clink Prison had gone forever.

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Planning a visit to The Clink Prison Museum with a group of 10 or more? Make it even more exciting by booking a guided t...
01/06/2026

Planning a visit to The Clink Prison Museum with a group of 10 or more? Make it even more exciting by booking a guided tour!

Our guides can bring history to life—whether you’re up for spooky tales of torture or a fun, educational experience. We’ll tailor the tour to suit your group!

To book or find out more, email [email protected]. We’d love to show you around!

Bing Crosby narrated a very spooky Disney cartoon - Washington Irving’s Legend of Sleepy Hollow featuring Ichabod Crane’...
01/06/2026

Bing Crosby narrated a very spooky Disney cartoon - Washington Irving’s Legend of Sleepy Hollow featuring Ichabod Crane’s headlong flight from the Headless Horseman - the ghost of a Hessian mercenary from the American Revolutionary War, in which soldiers from the German states of Hesse made up one quarter of British land forces – the British Army had three other wars to fight, rather more fighting than they could easily do, and the Americans were really much more ferocious in their defence of ‘No taxation without representation’ than expected and, if recruiting Germans wasn’t desperate enough, Parliament was considering Irishmen as well.
While regiments raised in a land full of big strong young men weren't without obvious merit, the vast majority happened to be Catholics but, since we really needed the troops, Parliament passed the 1778 Papists Act which, as well as allowing Catholics to serve Good King George, also permitted inheriting property and Catholic churches, priests and schools, all high-handedly rushed through assuming nobody could possibly mind, so you can imagine the consternation when Lord George Gordon did – declaring with deep-dyed bigotry that the only reason Irishmen wanted to join up was to foment rebellion, bring back Mass, Confession, rosaries, genuflecting, bells, smells, cardinals, nuncios and all the Papist kitkaboodle, and we would have a British Inquisition complete with burning heretics on every street corner before you could sing Ave Maria, and where would it end?
It may seem incredible in these enlightened times that anyone took this fetid tripe seriously, but Gordon’s Protestant Association got up a massive petition, which they presented to Parliament on this day in 1780 and, when it was rejected by 192 votes to 6, the angry mob rioted, in the proud tradition of oppressed and angry people to this day, turning their fury on people that had done them no harm at all, breaking into all the embassies of Catholic countries and trashing their chapels, smashing the windows of any Catholic Londoners – the Gordon Riots had begun, but they all started in America.
To be continued…

‘Don’t mess with gangsters’ said Gary the Old Soldier, ‘but definitely don’t mess with spooks’. That very sensible advi...
31/05/2026

‘Don’t mess with gangsters’ said Gary the Old Soldier, ‘but definitely don’t mess with spooks’. That very sensible advice might have served Elizabethan playwright extraordinary Christopher Marlowe very well – if he’d have listened to it – but, from the little we know, he probably wouldn’t have because, even if half the rumours aren’t true, there seems to have been an impetuosity to Marlowe to which acting in his own best interest was just too boring. Marlowe died yesterday in 1593, at the house of the Widow Bull in Deptford in the company of Nicholas Skeers, Robert Poley and Ingram Frizer, all crooks and spies, the latter of whom was later pardoned for stabbing him in the eye. They said it was self-defence.

Marlowe remains a mysterious figure, dividing opinion now as he doubtless did then; his plays like Dr Faustus, Tamburlaine, The Jew of Malta and the Massacre of Paris dwelt on extreme matters, so it’s easy to assume Marlowe was extreme too, but there’s little other real evidence; he is severally known as an atheist, a to***co smoker and a homosexual, but may have been none of those (though his being a clean living Puritan seems unlikely); there is evidence that he was a spy – working for the Privy Council.

There are as many theories as to who wanted Marlowe dead as there are about Jack the Ripper’s identity, and Elizabethan London, with everybody going out tooled up, was a dangerous place, but Frizer’s account simply doesn’t make sense, and the wound described (a 2-inch cut, ¼ inch deep) wouldn’t have been fatal – taken an eye out, maybe, but Kit would have coped with a patch – and they buried him in an unmarked grave! Little wonder that a coroner’s jury, set up by the BBC in 1986, decided that Marlowe had not died in Deptford at all but been disappeared by the intelligence services. Perhaps the most incredible (but charming) theory is that he lived out his days in Spain under the name Cervantes, and wrote Don Quixote.

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Joan of Arc was burned to death in the Old Marketplace in Rouen on this day in 1431, aged (at most) 19, for telling peop...
30/05/2026

Joan of Arc was burned to death in the Old Marketplace in Rouen on this day in 1431, aged (at most) 19, for telling people that she had the true genuine Word Of God and wearing men’s clothes, though the real reason was that she had united the French to drive the English out of much of France previously won by Henry V, which the French Prince Dauphin hadn’t managed to do, so she’d not only infuriated the English, she’d embarrassed the French and, as Machiavelli himself might have said (being way too clever by half), if you can’t stay friends with your own side, at least be friends with your enemies.

The English high command – not surprisingly – wanted Joan dead and, since she promised not to repeat her heresies on pain of burning to death, they did their damnedest to make sure she did, by providing her with men’s clothes and then attempting to r**e her until she wore them – it would be a war crime today. Her defence, to the forty-two French assessors, was that if she were to be kept in a prison like a man she ought to dress like a man, whereat they, in a disgraceful display of pusillanimity, found her guilty and handed her to the English to be burned to death.

It’s hard to imagine that Joan – French enemy or not - died without sympathy, even admiration. In the morning, she had taken the sacraments despite being excommunicate; after her sentence was read out, she asked to view a cross as she died, and an English soldier made her one from two sticks, which she kissed and held next to her chest; it may have been for this show of piety that a processional crucifix was fetched, to be held before her eyes as she burned.

After she was dead, the pyre was built up and burned again, and then again, to utterly destroy the bones of Joan of Arc; her ashes were thrown into the Seine, so that there would never be any relics of her. Joan later became a French national heroine and a saint.

It was the magnificently mordant and sanguine Jacobean playwright John Webster that drew comparison between Latin and th...
29/05/2026

It was the magnificently mordant and sanguine Jacobean playwright John Webster that drew comparison between Latin and the English legalese of his day and thereby compared the latter to Welsh with the words ‘Why, this is Welsh to Latin!’ in his immensely enjoyable and very gory black comedy The White Devil, written in 1612, thirty years after a Welshman had been hanged for, among his other righteous theological misdemeanours, wanting the Bible to be more freely available translated into Welsh rather than English or (worse) Latin.

This was John Penry, born in Brecknockshire; a Cambridge scholar, initially a Roman Catholic, but he soon became a Protestant, with strong Puritan tendencies. He did not seek ordination, but was licensed as University Preacher, commencing a career of pamphleteering and promulgation, in which his indignant insistence that, since God spoke Latin, He must perforce be able to speak Welsh as well first got him locked up by Archbishop Whitgift (of Canterbury) as a thorough nuisance – some people might have thought that more Bibles, even in Welsh, would be just what an archbishop wanted, but apparently not.

In September 1592, Penry joined the separatist congregation in Southwark, in which he seems to have become the regular preacher after the ministers, Francis Johnson and John Greenwood were locked in The Clink. Six months later, he was recognised by the vicar of Ratcliff and locked in Poultry Compter while the authorities tried to cook up a legal reason to hang him. The best they could get was a charge of sedition based on an impassioned draft of a letter to the queen – not presented nor published, but they convicted him anyway and Whitgift’s name was the first signed on the death warrant. Penry hanged at St Thomas-a-Watering on 29 May at the unusual hour of 4pm – the site of the gallows is now occupied by the Old Kent Road Tesco. Southwark is now the proud host of the London’s premier Welsh Chapel.

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There comes a point in any prolonged military campaign, when the forces of one side, built up to sufficient volume, are ...
28/05/2026

There comes a point in any prolonged military campaign, when the forces of one side, built up to sufficient volume, are brought to bear on a sufficiently unprotected, unsuspecting or wrong-footed target, decades of cultural, neighbourly or sectarian animosity are unleashed, and lots of people wind up dead, with the result that at any subsequent engagement where the previously losing side find themselves at the advantage, they are bound to cry out their righteous anger with the word ‘Remember’ and, in the latter half of the English Civil War, in the north at least, that word was followed by ‘Bolton’.

For on this day in 1644, Royalist troops under the command of James Stanley, 7th Earl of Derby, himself acting for the king’s nephew and commander in the field, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, stormed the Parliamentarian garrison at Bolton in Lancashire, catching the defenders off guard and cutting them down in the streets with particular ferocity; the weather was foul, giving less scope to distinguish between defending soldiers and fleeing townspeople than usual and, given Bolton’s particularly Puritan stance in a county, parts of which still clung, fairly tenaciously, to Catholicism, the sack and rapine that followed was particularly brutal. Parliamentary commander Colonel Alexander Rigby escaped (he’d found out the Royalist password) and later reported that he’d lost only 200 men, though widespread opinion was that his men and the townspeople had been slaughtered; Parliamentarian propaganda set the figure at 2,000.

Not a popular man among Parliamentarians, the Earl of Derby was captured near Nantwich in 1651. He was tried by court-martial at Chester and condemned to death for treason (he’d been communicating with King Charles II). He escaped, but was recaptured and taken to Bolton, where he reputedly spent his last hours at Ye Olde Man & Scythe public house (but more likely in a house on Churchgate) before being beheaded near the Market Cross.

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This is St George’s churchyard, but was also the outer court of the Marshalsea Prison, which moved here in 1811. The si...
27/05/2026

This is St George’s churchyard, but was also the outer court of the Marshalsea Prison, which moved here in 1811. The site is now partially occupied by the Local Studies Library, though the prison went back in a long rectangle from the road. Its most famous resident was John Dickens, father of Charles, imprisoned for debt in 1824, his wife and younger children lived nearby, while his elder daughter studied at the Royal Academy of Music, and his son laboured in a blacking factory near Charing Cross. On Sundays, the twelve year old Charles Dickens visited his father and family here.

If you shake a couple of Dickens' novels, a debtor will probably fall out of one, and the better 50% of Little Dorrit concerns the titular Amy’s time in the prison where her father, William Dorrit, is the longest residing debtor, 'The Father of the Marshalsea' with an outward benevolent gentility – but utterly selfish. When he inherits money and leaves the Marshalsea, the reader’s and Amy’s expectation is that he will become a philanthropist and champion of debtors but he does nothing of the kind, rather he denies ever having been anywhere near the Marshalsea, forbids its mention, buys a lavish lifestyle and goes on a grand tour. Amy is horrified at the transformation - needless to say, William Dorrit dies an unhappy man, while Amy lives happily ever after.

Dickens senior inherited too, and Charles was released from the hated blacking factory, but his mother, mindful of money, was quite keen for him to return there. He felt deeply betrayed, and seems never to have quite forgiven her because, while genial and kindly Wilkins Micawber, the hopeless debtor in David Copperfield, is quite clearly inspired by John Dickens, Mrs Catherine Nickleby, mother to Nicholas, muddle-headed and perpetually blind to her children’s danger, was based on Elizabeth Dickens - and the likeness is not kind. Dickens never told his mother, and she expressed the view that Mrs Nickelby was too stupid to be real.

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About halfway between the site of the Borough Compter and the Church of St George the Martyr, this building site on the ...
26/05/2026

About halfway between the site of the Borough Compter and the Church of St George the Martyr, this building site on the east side of the Borough High Street is about a quarter of the old Knight Marshall’s prison, otherwise known as the Marshalsea, which stood here from 1373, and gained a horrendous reputation for ill treatment and torture, with chaining someone up close to a co**se a particular speciality.

Two victims of the keepers’ greed and cruelty are Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London, who was held here from 1550 to 1553 and again from 1560 until his death in 1569, and had his bed confiscated because he would not pay a fee of £10, and also a Frenchman, M. La Touche, who reported that, in 1629, he was kept in ‘hunger and nakedness’ because he could not pay his gaol fees - even though an order had been issued for his release.

The 1729 Prison Commission reported that, ‘All the Support such poor Wretches have to subsist on, is an accidental Allowance of Pease, given once a week by a Gentleman, who conceals his Name, and about Thirty Pounds of Beef, provided by the voluntary Contribution of the Judge and Officers of the Marshalsea, on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; which is divided into very small Portions, of about an Ounce and a half, distributed with One-Fourth-part of an Half-penny Loaf ...

‘When the miserable Wretch hath worn out the Charity of his Friends, and consumed the Money, which he hath raised upon his Cloaths, and Bedding, and hath eat his last Allowance of Provisions, he usually in a few Days grows weak, for want of Food, with the symptoms of a hectic Fever; and when he is no longer able to stand, if he can raise 3d to pay the Fee of the common Nurse of the Prison, he obtains the Liberty of being carried into the Sick Ward, and lingers on for about a Month or two, by the assistance of the above-mentioned Prison Portion of Provision, and then dies’.

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One word that has become very over and inaccurately used in recent years is ‘Fake’; it may have started with Donald J Tr...
25/05/2026

One word that has become very over and inaccurately used in recent years is ‘Fake’; it may have started with Donald J Trump expressing his alarm at ‘Fake News’, but it has been very widely adopted, especially by nine-year-old boys eager to describe anything that it not real as ‘fake’ – ‘Those are fake chains’, ‘That’s fake fire’, ‘This is a fake prison’. None of these are true; nothing here is fake.

This is because a fake is something that has been made to closely resemble the real thing with the express intention (this is the crucial bit) of cheating someone, generally out of money, so a fake has to be very convincing indeed to be successful; if a nine year old detects that a thing is not real, it may be a model, a reproduction, a representation, a pastiche, a replica but, unless it is presented as the real thing and for sale with the intention of defrauding the buyer, it is not a fake. Our chains are replica prison irons (that’s why you are allowed to hold them), our fire is imitation (so it doesn’t burn the place down) and our museum is a recreation of the prison that stood on this site for nearly three hundred years – minus the violence, suffering and the horrible smell.

A true fake however (providing you haven’t been conned into buying it) is a thing of rare criminal beauty; consider the research, invention and artistry required to produce a copy of a Rubens, a Renoir or a Rembrandt so indistinguishable from the real thing that it might fool real experts – master forgers like Tom Keating (1917-84, finally put on trial in 79, where he claimed merely to have been following the spirit of the artists he’d copied!) stand as master craftsmen of crime. Keating went on to present television programmes on Old Masters for BBC 2, and a good Keating fake is probably quite valuable (to the right buyer of course) in its own right today.

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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