Site of the Giltspur Street Compter - Blue Plaques on Waymarking.com

The Giltspur Street Compter was a prison for debtors.

Mr Hepworth Dixon, in 1850, wrote[2]: "In Giltspur Street Compter, the prisoners sleep in small cells, little more than half the size of those at Pentonville, though the latter are calculated to be only just large enough for one inmate, even when ventilated upon the best plan that science can suggest. But the cell in Giltspur Street Compter is either not ventilated at all, or ventilated very imperfectly; and though little more than half the dimensions of the 'model cells' constructed for one prisoner, I have seen five persons locked up at four o'clock in the day, to be there confined till the next morning in darkness and idleness, to do all the offices of nature, not merely in each other's presence, but crushed by the narrowness of their den, into a state of filthy contact, which brute boasts would have resisted to the last gasp of life . . . Could five of the purest men in the world live together in such a manner, without losing every attribute of good which had once belonged to them?"

The plaque reads:

1. Old London Maps a picture of the Giltspur Street Compter
2. VictorianLondon.org THE CRIMINAL PRISONS AND PRISON-POPULATION OF LONDON