(The image above is shown with the permission of the Greater Manchester Police Museum and Archive.  If you click on this link you can see more historic images from their Flickr Photostream)

It was completed in 1848 and admitted its first prisoners a year later.  Initially it was owned by Manchester Corporation.  The building was composed of four sections, three for male prisoners and the fourth for women.  One description of the prisons says this about it, “The walls of the prison were strongly buttressed. The entrance on Hyde Road consisted of a double doored Janitors Office and a Courtyard, after crossing this you came to a ponderous iron lined Portcullis which was raised and lowered by a windlass on a side wall, this was worked by a key handle kept by the Duty Warden. Once through the Portcullis there was a lawn to cross before coming to the main entrance. Inside there were Reception Rooms, Waiting Rooms, the Governor's Office, Magistrates Rooms, the Hospital and the Chapel.”  Below you can see a view along one of the prison ranges.

(The image above is shown with the permission of the Greater Manchester Police Museum and Archive.  If you click on this link you can see more historic images from their Flickr Photostream)

Records reveal that a year after the prison opened it accommodated 329 male prisoners and 119 females.  Most of the prisoners were serving short sentences or were on remand awaiting trial in Manchester.  The prison’s claim to fame came in 1867 when a prison van containing six prisoners was enroute to the prison from the courthouse in the city centre.  Two of the prisoners in the van were men who had been arrested under the vagrancy act by police officers in Shudehill who suspected them of planning to rob a shop.  The two men were infact members of a Fenian group and as the van passed underneath the railway bridge on Hyde Road a group of 30 or 40 men attacked the van and its mounted escort and attempted to release the two prisoners.  Apparently the escort fled and in the melee the police officer in the van was shot and killed and the two prisoners escaped.  The incident was described as the “Manchester Outrage”.  Ultimately three men, including the two who escaped from the van, were tried, convicted and hung at the New Bailey Prison.  Over time they became known as the “Manchester Martyrs”.

In 1877 the prison passed from the control of Manchester Council to the British Government.  In 1888 it was declared unsafe, apparently due to subsidence from underlying colliery works.  The prison was demolished in 1890.  Some of the stone was acquired by the Jennisons who used it to build an enclosure for rhinos.  A housing estate was built on the land, as you can see below.  The red arrow points to the location of the former prison.  It was here, on Stowell Street,  that the British actor John Thaw grew up.