Becket House - an immigration prison in SE1

At present there are major building works going on next to London Bridge station in St Thomas Street with the construction of a 27 storey 'EDGE London Bridge' office block well underway.  Whatever you think of it, nobody is going to much miss the Home Office building it replaced, known as Becket House. Before the latter vanishes from historical memory it's important to record what happened there as possibly the last designated prison in a part of London that has seen many prisons over the centuries.

Protest at Becket House in 2010

Becket House's purpose was probably unclear to those fortunate enough not to have to use it, including the many commuters passing by as they exited the south entrance of London Bridge station. The only clue was the daily queue of people from all corners of the world stretching around the building each morning.

Becket House was an an Immigration Reporting Centre where asylum seekers were required to attend regularly.  In most cases this would involve a long queue and a short signing on but the terror underlying this was never really knowing when you left home that morning whether you would be coming back again. Asylum seekers could be detained when they turned up and for this purpose Becket House had what was called a 'short term holding centre' where people could be locked up until they were moved to a longer term detention centre and then potentially deported.  This was officially designated as a prison and subject to HM Prisons Inspectorate (see for instance this critical report of a 2009 inspection). It consisted of two adjoining secure 'holding rooms', one for single adults and one for families. As well as being used for people detained when signing it was used to lock up people arrested in immigration raids in the community organised from Becket House.  People were usually moved to a removal centre on the same day, though sometimes they were moved overnight to local police station cells. The centre was run for  some of its time for the then UK Borders Agency by Group 4 Securicor (G4S).

At one time Becket House was processing 15,000 appointments a year. How many people were detained in total is unknown but one report shows that between August and October 2009 alone 255 people had been detained, including 39 children (15%) and 59 women (23%). Among those who were  locked up there was Amir Siman-Tov from Morocco. Detained when he reported to Becket House in January 2016 he was transferred to Colnbrook Immigration Removal Centre where he died the following month (see Inquest report). 

As part of the Government's Hostile Environment, Becket House was designed to intimidate - in 2018 the Guardian reported that an official there had been filmed saying 'We are not here to make life easy for you. It’s a challenging environment we have got to make for people. It’s working because it’s pissing you off'.

Becket House was the focus for a number of protests from migrant solidarity groups. The building closed in 2022 and was demolished soon afterwards.

s

Several hundred people paused at Becket House during the March for Migrant Rights in October 2006

 which went from Imperial War Museum to Tanner Street park

No Borders protest in 2009

SOAS Detainee Support, Migrants Organise and These Walls Must Fall at Becket House in 2021

The only Immigration Reporting Centre for South London is now at Lunar House in Croydon. 

'Mutiny at Woolwich Dockyard' (1802) - attempted escape by hulk prisoners

During the 18th and 19th centuries, many ships no longer fit to sail the seas were converted into floating prisons. In the London area these 'prison hulks' were located in the Thames by Woolwich and Deptford.

This account of an  'Mutiny at Woolwich Dock Yard' (Morning Post, 2 August 1802) describes an attempted escape by prisoners who had been brought ashore from a prison hulk to work: 'for several months... above five hundred men have been employed in erecting a new wall at the back of the Governor's house. For some time, it since appears, they had planned an escape'.

On a Friday morning, 'about a dozen of these desperadoes went up to the keeper, armed with clasp knives, and demanded the key of the inner gate. The keeper refusing to deliver it up, he was knocked down, and the key taken by force from his pocket'. About 'fifteen or sixteen got into the outer yard' but still faced a 26 foot high wall, which only four managed to climb. By this time the keepers were armed, and two of convicts were shot, one killed. 

The army was mobilised from the nearby garrison, and 'the whole military force, about 2000 men, was placed at every avenue leading out of the town. The horse were stationed in Hanging Wood and its environs, and the foot marched instantly to the Dock-yard... After a very strict search of several hours in the Hanging Wood and the town, the whole were found concealed in different places about the Dock-yard. The four supposed to have have escaped into the wood were found by the military concealed under a quantity of timber in the front yard, near the principal entrance from the high road, and one of them refused to leave the place of his concealment until a shoulder ran his bayonet four inches into his shoulder. The offenders were carried to the dungeon and chained down until they receive their punishment'.

(The Hanging Woods covered an area that included what are now Maryon and Maryon Wilson Parks)

Morning Post, 7 August 1802

Conditions aboard the hulks were notorious. Writing in the last days of their use, Henry Mayhew and John Binny ('The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of London Life', 1862) devoted a detailed chapter to 'The Hulks at Woolwich':

'The idea of converting old ships into prisons arose when, on the breaking out of the American War of Independence, the transportation of our convicts to our transatlantic possessions became an impossibility. For the moment a good was effected, for the crowded prisons were relieved; but from the time when the pressure upon the prisons ceased, down to the present, when the hulks may be said to be doomed, all writers on penology have agreed in condemning the use of old ships for the purposes of penal discipline...

Some idea of the sanitary condition of these establishments, even so recently as 1841, may be gathered from the report of Mr. Peter Bossy, surgeon of the "WARRIOR" hulk, off Woolwich, which shows that in that year, among 638 convicts on board, there were no less than 400 cases of admission to the hospital, and 38 deaths!There are still officers in the Woolwich hulks who remember a time when the "Justitia"... contained no less than 700 convicts; and when, at night, these men were fastened in their dens - a single warder being left on board ship, in charge of them! 

Even so late as 1849, we find the "Unité", hospital ship at Woolwich, described in the following terms- "In the hospital ship, the 'Unité,' the great majority of the patients were infested with vermin; and their persons, in many instances, particularly their feet, begrimed with dirt. No regular supply of body-linen had been issued; so much so, that many men had been five weeks without a change; and all record had been lost of the time when the blankets had been washed"'.

'A view near Woolwich in Kent showing the employment of the convicts from the Hulks'
(the hulks are the ships without sails in the background, not sure of date of picture)

Burns Night + Scottish Martyrs at Woolwich

It's Burns Night on Saturday, something I always try and celebrate with some Islay whisky (I got a bottle of Laphroaig for Christmas), a vegetarian haggis and my dad's old bagpipe chanter from when he played in a band on Islay in the early 1950s. Plus my dad's collected poems of Robert Burns that I read from at his funeral. So yes, for me it's personal.

There's a couple of Burns Suppers that I am aware of locally. At Broca Food Market on Mantle Road SE4 they are having an event a night early on Friday 24th. £10 gets you a two course meal (including vegetarian option) and a classic Scottish film. I will overlook the crime of putting an 'e' in whisky on their poster!

On Saturday 25th, there's a Burns Night Banquet at the Hill Station, Kitto Road, SE14 - though I gather this has already sold out.

Robert Burns did actually once write a poem that mentioned part of South London. His 'Epistle From Esopus To Maria' (1794) includes the lines:

'The shrinking Bard adown the alley skulks,
And dreads a meeting worse than Woolwich hulks:
Though there, his heresies in Church and State
Might well award him Muir and Palmer's fate':

The reference here is to Thomas Fyshe Palmer and Thomas Muir, two of the members of the Scottish 'Friends of the People' who were transported to Australia for sedition in that period. They spent several months in irons doing forced labour on prison ships (hulks) in the Thames at Woolwich before being shipped to Botany Bayl - Palmer on the Stanislaus and Muir on the Prudentia. Burns was sympathetic to these Scottish radicals, as were many others. William Godwin, philosophical pioneer of anarchism and father of Mary Shelley, was among those who visited Palmer and Muir at Woolwich.

The Scottish Martyrs Memorial in Nunhead Cemetery was raised in honour of Palmer, Muir and others in the 1851.

History Corner: Transportation from Deptford to Australia

The Deptford riverside has been the starting point for  many journeys across the oceans, some of them freely chosen adventures, many of them not. One destination was Australia, where convicted prisoners were shipped off to penal colonies from the 1780s (the practice formally ended in 1868, though it had become rare by that point).

Reg Rigden's The Floating Prisons of Woolwich and Deptford (a pamphlet published by Greenwich Council in 1976), mentions one such voyage. On the 11 December 1814, Mary Langridge, Sarah Morris, Maria McIntyre and Ann Roberts were 'put on board the Northampton at Deptford'.

According to the Australian site Convict Records, 110 prisoners - all of them women - were taken on that voyage arriving in New South Wales in June1815. The ship went from Deptford to Portsmouth, from where it set sail on New Year's Day 1815. It was an eventful voyage, with the ship being temporarily captured by an American ship off Madeira. It made its way via Rio de Janeiro to Port Jackson, with four women dying during the voyage. On the way home, the Northampton went to China, returning to Hastings with a cargo of sandalwood. 

Just one voyage amongst so many, but showing clearly how Deptford in that period was a key point in the international  circulation of labour, commodities, ideas and much more. Globalisation is nothing new in South East London on Thames.