The village lock-up was once a famous, and indeed, infamous building in many rural settlements. Although architecturally it could vary enormously in style, either being refurbished from a prior building or created specifically for this one purpose, it always served a primary use: that of holding arrested people or those suspected of deviance, for a short duration.

Some lock-ups were known as round houses, because of their distinctive shape, although they differed in style – the lock-up in Wheatley, south Oxfordshire, was shaped more like a witch’s hat, with a pointed top. The Oxford English Dictionary refers to such buildings as places of detention for arrested persons, noting that the first written evidence of such a building comes from 1589. The lock-up emerged out of earlier examples of holding cells and other places for detaining offenders, and it’s therefore no coincidence that some lock-ups once had stocks, ducking stools or pillories situated next or near to them.

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, rural communities struggled to adequately police their typically rural crimes, such as theft (including animal thefts), burglary and drunken behaviour – the village pub (or pubs, as many places had several inns) was central to a community, and so drunkenness was a common problem. To ensure that those accused of crimes did not get away with their behaviour, several lock-ups were built or repurposed over this period.

In Cromford, Derbyshire, where Richard Arkwright had established a watermill in 1771, there was increasing concern at the number of yarn thefts locally. Arkwright’s solution was to turn an existing weaver’s cottage into a lock-up, creating a cell from an existing room, with a narrow bed chained to the wall, a fireplace, and space for a village constable to watch over the miscreant. It was still a small space, though, with little privacy for either offender or his watcher. Cromford’s neighbour, the village of Wirksworth, also had a lock-up, which is now offers ‘quirky historical’ tourist accommodation.

The lock-ups could be small because they were designed as a strictly short-term, temporary place of detention for local offenders, until they could be removed to a town and thus to jail or sent before the local magistrate. It was common for drunks to be put in a lock-up overnight to sober up, and this became enshrined in Victorian literature; Charles Kingsley, in 1863’s The Water Babies, created an apparently old story of the mayor of Plymouth being tired of hearing policemen coming in singing ‘What shall we do with the drunken sailor?’ and having to respond to them, ‘Put him in the round house till he gets sober, so early in the morning’.

Some 30 years earlier, the Taunton lock-up in Somerset – known, like the lock-up in Box, Wiltshire as ‘the blind house’ because of its lack of windows – was described as a ‘hole into which drunken and bleeding men were thrust and allowed to remain until the following day when the constable with his staff of office take the poor, crippled and dirty wretches before a magistrate, followed by half the boys and idle fellows of the town.’

Overseas lock-ups
Lock-ups were not just found in England and Wales. Across the Atlantic, America had also seen village lock-ups emerge in rural communities, but, as in Britain, these started to fall out of use in the 19th century. In 1886, the lock-up at Darby, Pennsylvania, was the subject of news stories when it was reported that the ‘little jail’ was haunted. Papers from New York to Dundee excitedly reported that a policeman ‘went to the village lock-up the other night, and was almost paralysed at the apparition he saw in the second storey’. He claimed to have seen a ‘ghastly’ old man, playing a flute belonging to the Darby Flute and Drum Corps, with the music being so awful that it kept everyone nearby awake.

The policeman, by the name of Carroll, was Darby’s sole law enforcement officer, and he had to spend his nights wandering up the area’s dark roads and lanes on his own. Although he insisted he did not believe in ghosts, there had been recently been a murder locally, and it sounds as though Carroll had been spooked searching for the murder suspect on his own. He had been about to search the lock-up on a dark night when he ‘saw’ the ghost, which led to him drawing a club with one hand and a revolver with the other – illustrating how scared he had been. Carroll was known to be a sober, hard-working man, and his stories were widely believed by the rest of Darby’s population. As a result, the Darby Flute and Drum Corps refused to practise, and villagers either refused to go out at night, or would only go out if they were fully armed.

Decline and fall
When the County Police Act was introduced in 1839, it allowed local magistrates to set up paid police forces in their county (becoming mandatory under the County and Borough Police Act of 1856) – and it was compulsory for those forces to have their own police stations and cells. The establishment of police cells meant that the village lock-up started to fall out of use, becoming increasingly redundant, although in some rural areas, the old lock-up remained in use as a temporary facility for police, such as in Colne, Lancashire, in 1840, when the new police force (16 policemen) were attacked by a mob of local men. One of them, a butcher, drew a knife and dared the police to touch him; as it was late, when he was disarmed, he was taken to the village lock-up for the night.

In 1897, the Shepton Mallet parish council met and discussed what should happen to their own, disused lock-up. One local councillor, Mr AS Gane (possibly Albert Selway Gane, 33, who was also a newspaper reporter), wondered whether they could buy or otherwise ‘obtain’ it for the use of the parish. When asked what use the parish could put it to, he suggested a mortuary: ‘they [the town] had no convenience of that sort now, and it could be utilised at a very small expense. They had a case not long ago at the railway station, where such a place would have been very convenient.’

Mr Gane optimistically thought that if he wrote to the county council, they would be happy to ‘hand it over’, as they had previously handed over the nearby Monkton Combe lock-up to its parish council, but others thought that the owners of the property next door might object to the lock-up being used for dead bodies.

During World War 2, many were used by the Home Guard, either to store arms or as sentry posts. Although only a small number survive today, compared to their heyday, the more noticeable ones have become something of a tourist attraction; on a summer’s day in Lacock, Wiltshire, for example, many National Trust members can be seen curiously peeking round the door of the local lock-up, situated in the heart of the village, although some seem unsure as to what purpose it served. In Cirencester, the lock-up is now surrounded by council offices, and although you can peer through its windows, to access it fully you need to go to the council reception and request the use of a key. In Filkins, Oxfordshire, the early 18th century lock-up is easily missed, although the village’s museum is adjacent to it; it is little more than a door between buildings, and more noticeable because of the ‘plank fence’ of stone slabs outside it than for its own building.

They may be easily missed, or dismissed simply as quirky little village buildings – but once, these lock-ups served a vital purpose in maintaining law and order in often isolated rural communities, and they are well worth seeking out.