Demolition of Angel Place
More information
Title
Demolition of Angel Place
Demolition of Angel Place
Reference
SC_PHL_01_365_63_4152 (Collage 115892)
Date
Collection
London Metropolitan Archives: LCC Photograph Library
Description
View of Angel Place, Southwark. Running east from Borough High Street in the west, it is named after a sixteenth-century inn which was on its north side. The area was badly damaged by bombing in World War II. A large warehouse or factory is on the north side of Angel Place, and on the south side is a brick wall, all that remains of Marshalsea Prison, and Grade II listed, number 1378370. Originally the site of the White Lion prison, from at least 1580 prison facilities were provided by the White Lion Inn, and it was used for the site of the rebuilt Marshalsea Prison opened here in 1811. Housing Southwark's debtors, trespassers, smugglers, and court-martialled Admiralty members, often with their families. Charles Dickens's father spent time here as a debtor, which had a major impact on Dickens's future writing career. He wrote Little Dorrit based on his own experiences as a child, with Little Dorrit’s father also a Marshalsea debtor prisoner. Dickens wrote about this alley, then called Angel Court, in Little Dorrit: "Whosoever goes into Marshalsea Place, turning out of Angel Court, leading to Bermondsey, will find his feet on the very paving-stones of the extinct Marshalsea Goal; will see its narrow yard to the right and to the left, very little altered if at all, except that the walls were lowered when the place got free; will look upon the rooms in which the debtors lived; will stand among the crowded ghosts of many miserable years." The prison was closed in 1842 and demolished in 1849. The modern Angel Place is to the south, on the site of the prison. A modern office and retail block occupies the original site of Angel Place.
View of Angel Place, Southwark. Running east from Borough High Street in the west, it is named after a sixteenth-century inn which was on its north side. The area was badly damaged by bombing in World War II. A large warehouse or factory is on the north side of Angel Place, and on the south side is a brick wall, all that remains of Marshalsea Prison, and Grade II listed, number 1378370. Originally the site of the White Lion prison, from at least 1580 prison facilities were provided by the White Lion Inn, and it was used for the site of the rebuilt Marshalsea Prison opened here in 1811. Housing Southwark's debtors, trespassers, smugglers, and court-martialled Admiralty members, often with their families. Charles Dickens's father spent time here as a debtor, which had a major impact on Dickens's future writing career. He wrote Little Dorrit based on his own experiences as a child, with Little Dorrit’s father also a Marshalsea debtor prisoner. Dickens wrote about this alley, then called Angel Court, in Little Dorrit: "Whosoever goes into Marshalsea Place, turning out of Angel Court, leading to Bermondsey, will find his feet on the very paving-stones of the extinct Marshalsea Goal; will see its narrow yard to the right and to the left, very little altered if at all, except that the walls were lowered when the place got free; will look upon the rooms in which the debtors lived; will stand among the crowded ghosts of many miserable years." The prison was closed in 1842 and demolished in 1849. The modern Angel Place is to the south, on the site of the prison. A modern office and retail block occupies the original site of Angel Place.
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