New Building
Its 1758 replacement was built at a cost of £7800 on a 4-acre (16,000 m2) site close to St George's Fields (south of Borough Road, close to its junction with Blackman Street/Newington Causeway, and a short distance from Horsemonger Lane Gaol; today the site is occupied by the Scovell housing estate). Although much larger and better appointed than some other London prisons, the new King's Bench still gained a reputation for being dirty, overcrowded and prone to outbreaks of typhus. Debtors had to provide their own bedding, food and drink. Those who could afford it purchased 'Liberty of the Rules' allowing them to live within three square miles of the prison.
On 10 May 1768, the imprisonment in King's Bench of radical John Wilkes (for writing an article for the The North Briton, that severely criticized King George III) prompted a riot - the Massacre of St George's Fields - in which five people were killed. Like the earlier buildings, this prison was also badly damaged in a fire started in the 1780 Gordon Riots.
In 1842 it became the Queen's Prison taking debtors from the Marshalsea and Fleet Prisons and sending lunatics to Bedlam. Fees and the benefits they could buy were abolished, and soon after it passed into the hands of the Home Office during the 1870s, it was closed and demolished.
Read more about this topic: King's Bench Prison
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