Maidstone Prison: A Century as Kent's Gallows, Where the 'Brides in the Bath' Killer Was Hanged

Day 14 of 15. Yesterday's story was Oakwood Hospital, Barming - a Victorian asylum built for 168 patients that was, within living memory, crammed with over 2,000. Today's story is just down the road and a few decades earlier: the Kentish ragstone prison that was, for a century, the county's own gallows.

Maidstone has held prisoners for over 200 years, but the building that still stands on Week Street today dates to a rebuild between 1811 and 1819, costing £200,000 - a huge sum at the time. The original county jail, converted to a prison in the 1740s, had been inspected by the prison reformer John Howard, who reported overcrowding and poor ventilation; conditions stayed largely unchanged for decades until the reconstruction finally came. The new prison was designed by Daniel Asher Alexander, who had also worked on Dartmoor Prison, with input from Kent's own county architect, John Whichcord Snr - the same man who, a few years later, designed the Kent County Lunatic Asylum at Barming, yesterday's story in this series. Built from Kentish ragstone quarried locally, the prison was designed to hold 552 prisoners, including 62 women. The first 141 prisoners arrived in March 1819.

From 1831, Maidstone Prison became the official place of execution for anyone condemned to death in the county of Kent. Before 1868, hangings were carried out in public outside the prison's main gate - a spectacle that drew crowds, as it did at county gaols across the country. The Capital Punishment Amendment Act 1868 ended public executions nationally, and from then on Maidstone's hangings took place inside the prison walls, out of public view. The last execution at Maidstone was carried out in 1930.

The most notorious of those executions was George Joseph Smith, hanged at Maidstone in August 1915. Smith had married and murdered three women in turn between 1912 and 1914, drowning each one in a bath and then claiming a payout from the life insurance policy he'd taken out on her shortly before - a method of killing so distinctive that the press and, later, true-crime writers dubbed him the "Brides in the Bath" murderer. His trial, built almost entirely on the suspicious pattern repeating itself three times over, became one of the most widely reported British criminal cases of the Edwardian era. He was hanged at Maidstone that August, one of the prison's best-remembered executions.

Maidstone's cells have held more than murderers. Éamon de Valera, who would later become Taoiseach and President of Ireland, was briefly held at Maidstone in 1917, during the period of unrest that followed the Easter Rising. Two decades later, German national Hermann Görtz was convicted of espionage in 1936 and held at Maidstone before being released and deported back to Germany in 1939, shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. John Vassall, a British civil servant convicted in 1962 of spying for the Soviet Union, also served part of his sentence there.

Unlike Barming's old asylum, Maidstone Prison was never decommissioned and converted into housing - it's still an operating Category C men's prison today, holding around 600 prisoners as of the late 2000s, most of them foreign nationals serving sentences before deportation. In August 2007, part of the prison, the Weald Wing, was closed after Legionella bacteria was found in the water supply; since 2009 the prison has operated partly as a sex offenders' unit. It's also had an unexpected second life as a TV backdrop: the prison's distinctive exterior appeared in the title sequence of the 1970s BBC comedy Porridge and the 1990s sitcom Birds of a Feather. These days it's classed as a training prison, with a print shop, a brickworks, and gardens tended by prisoners that have repeatedly won awards - a quieter present for a building whose gatehouse once drew crowds to watch a hanging.

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Source: Wikipedia, HM Prison Maidstone.