George was right
TWO decades later, little has changed except that the prisons have deteriorated and the arithmetic has improved. Succes- sive London property booms have come in like a tide to float the values upwards. Brixton? Call it Streatham, it's half-way there. The Scrubs? The Kinnocks are neighbours. Wandsworth? Home of the Soanely Rangers — "Soanely quarter of an hour from Sloane Square.' Pentonville, Holloway? Next to the fought-over King's Cross site, and better. The replacement of the Victorian prisons must come close to financing itself. I see, for example, that for just over £500,000 the Government's own Property Services Agency has made a prison to take 600, by converting an army barracks in Surrey. Purpose-built prisons are more expensive, but electronic security methods must make them cheaper to run than their labour-intensive predecessors. Where would they go? In the country, on the islands? More naturally, nowadays, to places which have lost traditional indus- tries and cannot easily attract new ones — Teesside, for instance, or the Cumberland coast. A chairman from the north-west suggested the Liverpool hinterland: 'Move the prisons closer to their markets,' he said. They have markets in London, too, but that does not justify London's present prisons, and no doubt nothing could. George, as usual, was right: pull them down, sell them up.
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