Clink Prison Museum

One of the most amusing scenes (picture above) is of a prisoner, sitting at a table with a mouse in a makeshift-cage. The explanatory text suggests that prisoners often weren’t fed very much, and so would catch mice and feed them up within cages to be eaten later. I’ve no doubt that this is based on some story documented somewhere, but it did seem unlikely to me to be a particularly regular occurance. After all, surely it would be more efficient to eat all the food you could get, rather than feeding it to a mouse. And building a cage must have taken a fair amount of effort, with limited resources. Perhaps though, the mice that were kept by prisoners were more for entertainment purposes (ala the ‘Green Mile’), to pass the time, rather than a serious food production chain.

From the perspective of someone who has now worked within the museums industry for a year, it’s interesting to observe that the Clink museum is much more on the tourist-attraction end of the spectrum than being particularly scholarly and academic. The reliance on the gore and the grimness of the prison, including some horrendous torture devices, would be frowned upon by some other museums as pandering to a fairly basic ’shock and awe’ response. There’s a fine line to be drawn between genuinely conveying the social reality of the period, and turning the gore into entertainment. Whilst The Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s and the London Dungeon are both massive tourist attractions, they’re not held up highly as beacons of educational interactions.

Whilst the museum is mostly things to look at and read, there are a few things you can physically interact with (’interactives’ in museum-speak) at the end. A row of replica torture devices are chained to a bit of wood on the floor, inviting you to feel how heavy they were. More popular though is a wooden block and a foam axe that you can use with your friends to pose for a ‘beheading’ photograph. It’s quite a simple idea, but every family and group of teenagers I saw that went through the museum stopped to take it in turns to take the executioner photos of each other. It just goes to show that it’s important to build in photo opportunities to visitor attractions, especially now that most people have an easily accessible camera phone. Theme parks are particular good at this, often having signposts signalling good spots to take photos from, sometimes sponsored as ‘Kodak moments’. The concept is one that I know is being thought about for the Science Museum’s new Launchpad gallery though.

The Clink Prison Museum is probably one of the smallest museums in London, and receives no public or lottery money, but goes to show that these kinds of attractions can, with the right subject and location, continue to survive (although I’m guessing that the museum itself is probably fairly poor). If you’re in the area, the museum is worth a quick visit. My last word though is obout their website, which as a one-page affair with an ‘under construction’ notice is piss-poor and woefully inadequate. If they need an expert in developing museum websites, they know where to find me…

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