A splendid church recalls the Somerset town of Shepton Mallet’s past as a wool town. Cider-making, brewing, shoe and glove making all prospered, and the fine market cross watched over people trading in the square. Methodist preacher John Wesley got a hostile reception here, as did the ‘Spinning Jenny’, which threatened jobs by industrialising textile manufacture. Today, the Bath and West Show is hosted close by at a 240-acre site. None of this brought me to Shepton Mallet, though: it was the old prison, HMP Cornhill, aka ‘The Mallet’, that drew me like a Black Maria delivering a dangerous prisoner.

Shepton’s story can be traced to an edict of James I (the Bridewell Act of 1610), stipulating that every county should have a gaol. In fact, Somerset already had two, at Taunton and Ilchester; however, it was felt another house of correction was needed for the county’s eastern division. Shepton was chosen in 1624 with Cornehill (or Cornhill) House purchased the following year from Rev. E. Barnard for £160, with George Sheephaye the first governor. Britain’s longest established prison (as it was to become) duly opened as a house of correction in 1625 and admitted its first inmates: people awaiting trial, debtors and short-termers given hard labour for minor offences.

Conditions were dreadful, with men, women and children incarcerated together with scant attention given to fussy, liberal notions like prisoner welfare or rehabilitation. There was no segregation for severity of crime so serious offenders mixed with those guilty of lesser offences. Drunkenness, promiscuity and disease were rife, with regular outbreaks of ‘gaol fever’. Having said all that, the end of the 1700s saw a list of some 200 capital offences (the so-called ‘Bloody Code’), so you were lucky to end up inside rather than swinging from the gallows. Prison reformer and philanthropist John Howard (1726–90) visited Shepton and was dismayed. His work The State of Prisons (1777) set the tone for reform with the Penitentiary Act (1779) forcing change upon Shepton and elsewhere.

Extensions to this law of the late 18th and early 19th centuries alleviated the prison’s problems, but it was still not for the faint hearted. Little remains of those original structures, the 1790 rebuild and 1820s/1830s extensions being most manifest today. In 1823, a human treadmill was added for prisoners facing hard labour. One of the largest ever constructed, it was also one of the few serving a practical purpose as it powered a mill located just outside the prison confines. Hard labour was a punishment, though, so it didn’t have to be useful.

With Taunton and Ilchester gaols’ closure during the 19th century, plus the ending of public executions (1868), Shepton became the county gaol and overseer of executions. Judicial executions took place at the prison in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with seven men executed for murder between 1889 and 1926, their remains buried within the prison’s grounds, where they still lie. The foreboding execution room later became, of all things, a library (1997). The number of prisoners at Shepton was declining in the early 1900s, with the last women departing in 1918, and around 50 men left come 1930. The prison wasn’t continuously used, as it closed in that year because of its falling roll call and deteriorating condition. That might have been the end but for WW2.

Shepton reopened for WW2 as a British military prison. It wasn’t only for members of the armed forces – some of the nation’s most treasured documents were safeguarded here: the Domesday Book; Magna Carta; the logs of Nelson’s Victory; dispatches from Waterloo; and the ill-fated Munich Agreement. American servicemen were also imprisoned at Cornhill, some being executed here for capital offences. Shepton continued as a military prison until 1966; inmates including the Kray twins for one month in the early 1950s, both convicted of assaulting a police officer while AWOL from National Service. The prison then returned to civilian use, embarking on its final chapter in 2001 as a Category C male lifers’ prison, housing men guilty of serious offences but who’d served much of their sentence already so were considered low risk.

Just under 400 years elapsed from Cornhill locking up its first inmates to transferring its last prisoner on 11 March 2013. It was unviable to maintain an ancient building where it cost three times as much to detain a convict than in its modern equivalent elsewhere. It was the end for the UK’s longest-established active prison. The chapel bell was once a familiar sound for prisoners and custodians. It called prisoners to Sunday service, and sounded the alarm in the event of an escape. As John Donne intoned: ‘Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’ The prison bell tolled no more.

The prison was mothballed pending confirmation of its future. What do you do with a Grade II* Listed building that no longer serves its intended purpose, especially such a singular one? Even the vertiginously high walls ringing the prison are listed. Listed status guaranteed security against demolition but made renovation problematical. There is everything present you’d anticipate from an old gaol: the galleried Victorian wings; an exercise yard where prisoners enjoyed a tantalising breath of fresh air; a gymnasium; the family visiting hall; prisoner workshops; and the kitchen to prepare prison ‘nosh’. But what could be done with it all?

There were mixed feelings in Shepton about the prison’s presence. It occurred to me how close it was to the town centre, easily walkable, and therefore a real and present concern for those worried about security. Yes, there were escapes, but relatively few, and those attempting it often finished with broken limbs for their troubles. Others considered the prison part of the community, which benefited economically from its proximity.

Standing by the main entrance, I spotted a 20th century addition, connected to the earlier structure with a walkway. There were no cells in this extension, just workshops, etc. Walking a narrow road between those high walls, the prison was hidden on one side, with non-consecrated ground on the other, where some prisoners found their final resting place. Around the corner, in Cornhill, was the governor’s house and another entrance, built in 1790, that once cameoed in the opening sequence of The Dirty Dozen (1967). After closure the prison clinched more starring roles: Paddington 2 (2017) and Des (2020), the biopic of Dennis Nilsen.

The name of ‘Gaol Lane’ is the one written throwback, all other original evidence having been erased on closure. HMP Cornhill became a visitor attraction and events venue from 2017 with tours offered under the ‘Jailhouse Tours’ brand. There’s also ghost tours, activities including an ‘Escape Room Experience’ and ‘A Night Behind Bars’. There may be another chapter to come. Planning permission was granted in 2016 for conversion into homes and ‘community spaces’. This lapsed in 2019 but those plans have been re-submitted and reapproved by Mendip Parish Council, so Shepton could be among the first UK gaols converted to residential use, and its inmates free to come and go as they please.