UK Prison History Online

You may not know it but there's a chance your 19th-century UK ancestor spent time in a prison or lock-up.

Prison History, with resources on the practice and experience of imprisonment in the British Isles, hosts two datasets: 19th Century Prisons, a database of 846 English prisons that existed between 1800 and 1899; and Your Local Lock-Up, an evolving collection of sites (mostly in England) used for temporary confinement between 1500 and 1999.



The search capabilities include a map with the sites pinned, extensive sources for many of those sites and a reading list for additional material.