The combined 'footprint" of Chelsea's campus, including the Parade Ground, Tate Britain and the adjacent housing estate, reveals the pre-existing site and structure of the Millbank Prison. The aerial photograph, taken from a ballooon, shows how extensive a structure the prison and its environs was in this outlying part of Westminster along the 'millbank' of the River Thames.
The original prison design was to be the prototype example of the Panopticon, a type of institutional building that was designed by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832). The concept of the design is to allow a watchman to observe all the inmates of an institution without them being able to tell whether or not they are being watched, effectively leaving the watching to the watched. No true Panopticon prisons to Bentham's designs have ever been built. The closest are the buildings of the now abandoned Presidio Modelo in Cuba.
Millbank Prison was originally constructed as the National Penitentiary but for a significant part of its history the prison served as a holding facility for convicted prisoners before they were transported to Australia.
It was opened in 1816 and closed in 1890.
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| View of Millbank Prison from Vauxhall Bridge Road |
The prison was designed by an architect called William Williams but his plan was revised by Thomas Hardwick. Because of the marshy condition of the site on which the prison was to stand, the builders experienced problems of subsidence. The last architect involved, Robert Smirke, finally resolved the difficulty along with the engineer John Rennie the Elder, by introducing a highly innovative concrete raft to provide a secure foundation.
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| Booth's mapping of London according to income and social class |
The Prison was demolished c.1890 after a very chequered history. The Map illustrated above comes from Life and Labour of the People in London, a multi-volume book by Charles Booth which provided a survey of the lives and occupations of the working classes of late nineteenth century London. The first edition was published in two volumes as Life and Labour of the People, Vol. I (1889) and Labour and Life of the People, Vol II (1891). The second edition was entitled Life and Labour of the People in London, and was produced in 9 volumes 1892-97. A third edition, running to a grand total of seventeen volumes appeared 1902-3. The map section shown here captures the moment the "footprint" of the old prison begins to structure these urban spaces until the present. It also stands as an example of research and the value of mapping, because a noteworthy feature of the study was the production of maps describing poverty. Levels of wealth and poverty found by the research's investigators were mapped out on a street by street basis. The note books used to carry out this investigation are held at the Archives Division of the British Library of Political and Economic Science (London School of Economics).
Life and Labour of the People in London can be seen as one of the founding texts of British sociology, drawing on both quantitative (statistical) methods and qualitative methods (particularly ethnography). Because of this, it was an influence on the Chicago School sociology (notably the work of Robert E. Park) and later the discipline of community studies associated with the Institute of Community Studies in East London.
The Tate Gallery and Tate Britain
The gallery was founded in 1897, as the National Gallery of British Art. The building of the gallery on the Millbank site was funded by Sir Henry Tate to house British Art on the condition that the State pay for the site and revenue costs. Henry Tate also donated his own collection to the gallery. It was initially a collection solely of modern British art, concentrating on the works of modern, that is Victorian, painters. When its role was changed to include the national collection of Modern Art as well as the national collection of British art, in 1932, it was renamed the Tate Gallery to honour the sugar magnate and benefactor, who had laid the foundations for the collection. In 2000, the Tate Gallery transformed itself into the current-day Tate, or the Tate Modern, which consists of a federation of four museums: Tate Britain, which displays the collection of British art from 1500 to the present day; Tate Modern, which is also in London, houses the Tate's collection of British and International Modern and Contemporary Art from 1900 to the present day. Tate Liverpool, in Liverpool has the same purpose as Tate Modern but on a smaller scale, and Tate St Ives displays Modern and Contemporary Art by artists who have connections with the area. All four museums share the Tate Collection.
The Royal Army Medical College
Chelsea College of Art & Design moved in 2004/5 to a new campus, formerly the Royal Army Medical College that occupies a space adjacent to Tate Britain forming the site which was previously occupied by the Millbank Penitentiary. The buildings that originally housed the RAMC were built by John Henry Townsend and Wilfred Ainslie in Imperial Baroque style. They also designed the adjoining Regimental Officers’ Mess and Commandant’s House, in French Renaissance style. The buildings were opened by King Edward the VII and Queen Alexander on 15 May 1907. Queen Alexandra's Military Hospital occupies the northern part of the Millbank Priison site to the north of the Tate Gallery and opened in 1905, and now houses Tate administration.
During the first world war the college was used to prepare vaccines, including a vaccine against typhoid, alongside research into protection against chemical warfare. In the second world war, the college provided courses in tropical medicine.
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| Bombsight.com View of WWII Bombing at Millbank |
The college was seriously damaged in 1941 by bombs and the walls of the Tate Gallery nearby still show signs of the damage.
Use of the Parade Ground Millbank
The Parade Ground at Millbank is at the heart of the Chelsea campus, and has experienced a variety of conditions in its history associated with Chelsea CAD, from accommodating construction workers to providing a venue for Fashion Show extravaganzas. However the Parade Ground's main function has been in relation to the life and work of the art and design community at Chelsea, and accessible to the members of public who use this "city square" as part of their itinerary to their work, office, school, home, hotel, tube station, bus stop, river boat or art gallery.
Chris Burden - A Flying Steam Roller 2006
In 2006 the artist Chris Burden's work A Flying Steam Roller was installed on the Parade Ground.
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