Holloway Prison cast a long shadow over British life. Opened in 1852 as a towering Victorian fortress modeled on Warwick Castle, it was built to house a growing prison population in London, its star-shaped design allowing guards to stand at the center and see down every corridor. For more than a century and a half, it absorbed the shifting fashions of punishment, and from 1902 onward it held only women, becoming one of Europe’s largest female prisons. Within its walls, five women met the hangman’s noose, the highest number of female executions in England and Wales during the twentieth century.
Its name became synonymous with some of the country’s most notorious female offenders, from Ruth Ellis and Myra Hindley to Rose West and, more recently, Joanna Dennehy. The Victorians built prisons to punish, not reform. Offenders were meant to be held up as examples of how not to behave, and the grand buildings that dominated town centers made that purpose visible to everyone. Life inside was harsh.
Prisoners were kept in silence, separated from one another, and forced into menial labor like walking the treadwheel or picking oakum. The reasoning was that silence would drive repentance, leaving prisoners alone with their thoughts and their crimes. Women made up a far larger share of the prison population then, about 17 percent compared to roughly 5 percent today. Many were imprisoned for offenses tied to prostitution, which the Victorians criminalized heavily.
The class system followed women through the gates. Wealthy prisoners were allowed books and visits, middle-class women did sewing, and the poorest, described as the great unwashed, lived on porridge with almost no privileges at all. Some of the darkest chapters in Holloway’s history came early. In the late Victorian period, infanticide accounted for around 65 percent of all homicides in England, and a shadowy trade known as baby farming flourished.
Women who bore illegitimate children, usually poor servants or working-class girls, paid middlewomen to take their babies and have them adopted. Most baby farmers were simply boarding the children for a fee, but two London women turned the practice into murder. Annie Walters and Amelia Sach charged young mothers 25 to 30 pounds to adopt their newborns, then killed the infants. No one knows exactly how many children they took, but investigators believed the number ran into the dozens.
Suspicion fell on them when a policeman landlord noticed babies arriving but never leaving. In January 1903, an Old Bailey jury took just 40 minutes to find them both guilty. They were hanged together at Holloway on February 3, the first and last female double execution of the century. Their case fed a huge moral panic about baby farming, though little recognition was given to the desperate circumstances that drove these young mothers to hand over their children.
The suffragettes gave Holloway a different kind of infamy. When the Women’s Social and Political Union began its campaign in 1903, imprisonment became a badge of honor. Spending time inside the prison was known as earning the Holloway degree, and those who served time were allowed to wear the Holloway badge, a silver arrow in purple, white, and green. Refusing to be cowed, the suffragettes sang marches around the exercise yard, conducted from a window by the composer Ethel Smyth using her toothbrush.
Their greatest weapon was the hunger strike. The government, terrified that a woman might die in prison and become a martyr, ordered that striking suffragettes be force-fed. Women were held down in their cells while tubes were forced up their noses or down their throats, a deeply distressing procedure that some accounts say was performed through other parts of the body in other prisons. The government eventually passed the Cat and Mouse Act, releasing weakened prisoners on license so they could recover outside, only to rearrest them if they broke the law again.
The campaign ended with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, and the vital work women did during the war helped lead to the Representation of the People Act in 1918, which gave women the vote. Holloway’s next major execution revealed how attitudes toward women could shape a case. Edith Thompson was intelligent, successful, attractive, and married to a loving husband when she fell into a tormented affair with a much younger man, Freddie Bywaters. After a night out, Bywaters jumped out from the bushes and stabbed her husband to death.
Though Bywaters struck the blow, Edith was tried alongside him, incriminated by love letters she had written wishing her husband dead. The case became a sensation. The public, believing they had moved beyond pre-war barbarism, was shocked when a woman was sentenced to hang for the first time in twenty years. Edith Thompson and Freddie Bywaters were hanged on January 9, 1923, Thompson at Holloway and Bywaters at Pentonville.
The execution was traumatic. Thompson suffered a hemorrhage on the scaffold, and there was speculation that she may have been pregnant, an ordeal that reportedly so disturbed the executioner that he later took his own life. Afterward, new rules required that women wear thick canvas undergarments during executions, so that no such sight would ever be seen again. By the 1930s, the female prison population had fallen sharply, and Holloway became Britain’s largest and London’s only women’s prison.
During the Second World War, prison thinking began to shift. In 1945, Holloway appointed its first female governor, Charity Taylor, who pushed for a psychological approach to prisoners. She argued that these were not simply evil people but individuals who had lived difficult lives and might be suffering from mental illness. Under her leadership, women were allowed to wear makeup and their own clothes, and mothers who gave birth in prison could keep their babies with them.
But she could not change the law on capital punishment. In 1954, Styllou Christofi became the fourth woman executed at Holloway. A Greek Cypriot immigrant who spoke little English, she killed her daughter-in-law in a fit of hatred while her son was away, strangling her and then setting the house on fire. She tried to raise the alarm about the children sleeping upstairs, but only after the damage was done.
Her execution stirred little public sympathy, largely because she was seen as an immigrant and therefore a less sympathetic figure. The fifth and final execution came the following year. Ruth Ellis was a glamorous young nightclub worker and former model caught in a violent and controlling relationship with David Blakely, a man who once punched her in the stomach, causing a miscarriage. In 1955, she waited for him outside a London pub and shot him dead as he left.
She was hanged at Holloway on July 13, 1955, by Albert Pierrepoint. The case provoked enormous public emotion. On the day of her execution, crowds gathered outside the prison, women among them pushing prams. Many felt she had been a victim herself, and her case is widely seen as a turning point in the campaign against capital punishment.
It took another ten years, but the death penalty was abolished in Great Britain in 1965, replaced by a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment. With the gallows gone, Holloway entered a long and troubled period of reform. By the 1960s, the old Victorian building was widely condemned. Former inmates described it as gray, smelly, and dirty, with open landings separated only by suicide netting.
One woman recalled her first night in a cell with another prisoner who picked off her toenails and put them in her tea, while broken windows were stuffed with toilet roll and library books. There was a bucket to urinate in and slopping out at five in the morning. Self-harm and attempted suicide were common, as was violence, much of it directed by the women against themselves. One eighteen-year-old, kept in the basement under twenty-four-hour watch, set fire to herself.
In 1968, authorities decided to rebuild Holloway as a local prison and psychiatric institution, guided by the belief that criminality in women had psychological roots that could be cured. Not all of Holloway’s inmates were there for violence, and some adapted to prison life in unexpected ways. Myra Hindley, known as the most hated woman in Britain for her role in the Moors murders, spent several years at Holloway and became close to a female prison officer named Pat Cairns. The two began a three-year affair, and Cairns helped Hindley plan an escape to South America using duplicate keys.
Another prisoner reported the plot to the governor, but Hindley used her charm to convince the governor the accusation was a lie. The plan continued until police heard rumors of the escape in 1973. Cairns paid a heavy price, serving her own prison sentence and losing her career. The episode showed that even incarcerated female offenders could still manipulate those around them.
The rebuilt Holloway opened in 1985, replacing the archaic Gothic buildings with a modern facility that one former inmate compared to student accommodation. There was a purpose-built gym, an education block, a library, and classrooms. The new design, laid out like a hospital with long corridors and hidden corners, made surveillance harder but created a more humane environment. Most women in Holloway were not there for violent crime.
In 2015, around 80 percent were serving sentences of less than six months. Many had backgrounds of poverty, abuse, and addiction. More than half of women in prison reported having suffered emotional, physical, or sexual abuse as children, and two-thirds had committed offenses to get money to buy drugs. Women accounted for only 5 percent of the prison population but a third of all self-harm attempts.
In 2015, HMP Holloway was judged inadequate and antiquated and was ordered to close. Six months later, its inmates were moved to newer prisons with more humane surroundings. The prison that had stood for over 160 years, witnessing some of the most significant moments in British criminal history, shut its gates for good. Its story left behind a difficult question: how far had society really come since the Victorians filled their prisons with the poor, the illiterate, the abused, and the mentally ill?
Those same people, it seemed, were still the ones filling prison cells. Penal fashions had changed, but the deeper problems remained.