Beyond the moody moorlands of the West Country where wild ponies graze along the grassy dunes leading up to Cornwall’s dramatic cliffs, an old stone stronghold stands cold and indifferent to modernity.
The Bodmin Jail, built by Napoleonic prisoners of war in the 1770s, is a crude relic of the Georgian-era penal system that hanged folks for stealing a loaf of bread. The jail is notorious not just for its dozens of public executions, but for being England’s first to lock inmates in individual cells.
Now, those very cells are the chic suites of a 70-room luxury hotel.
Thanks to a triumphant feat of adaptive restoration, tourists can creep around Bodmin’s haunted chambers before sipping craft cocktails at a champagne bar and laying their heads down on silk pillows under the moonlight that leaks through barred windows. Welcome to your room for the weekend: a serene, warmly lit stone cave that unlocks a darker side of England’s past.
The site, in its namesake civil parish of Bodmin, is fabled not only for the 55 executions it held, nor for being one of the first to house female inmates in separate wings. During the upheaval of World War I, the country temporarily commandeered the property on royal business to guard its national treasures such as the Crown Jewels and the Domesday Book.
Such history begets intrigue. Not long after its final execution, the prison was decommissioned in 1927 and set to be razed. But with its metre-thick stone walls proving too daunting for demolition, the demo team instead began bringing in revelers to witness mock executions and gamble amidst nightclub vibes.
But the site was abandoned in the mid-20th century after a botched roof repair began letting the elements ravage the site to ruins.
It wasn’t until the 2000s that private investment came pouring back in to restore the remains. First endorsed by a local family who acquired the property at some point and then an imaginative businessman, redevelopment of the crumbling institution began in earnest in 2015 with a £50 million (US$57 million) investment by Mallino Development Group.
The first phase modernised and reopened the jail’s administrative block as a museum-like attraction to the public in 2020. The second phase, completed by Twelve Architects late last year, transformed the two adjacent detention wings into a boutique, “full-sensory” hotel.
When Twelve’s master planners first walked through Bodmin’s gates, they entered a roofless ruin overrun by flora and fauna. Twelve director Lorraine Stoutt Griffith waded around amid overgrown foliage as bats swooped overhead. “It was an amazing space,” she told LoopNet, CoStar's commercial real estate marketplace. “But our initial thoughts when our client came to us with this challenge was, ‘are you crazy?’”
Fast forward six years to Griffith lounging behind those same thick stone walls, propped up by plush pillows on a king-size bed, watching the telly and sipping Earl Grey. “It has a very calm feel,” she remarked on her stay at the five-star Bodmin Jail Hotel.
A lot of time and work led to that tranquil moment: Time spent planning and replanning, engineering and re-engineering, constructing and reconstructing, and of course, advocating to ensure the heritage site and its living history weren’t dealt the ultimate sentence.
A heritage project of this scale demands rigorous scrutiny, but as Griffith said, “[Stakeholders] were worried that it was going to eventually fall into rot and ruin; and that it would be unsavable. So they were keen to work with us to give the building a new lease on life.”
The project was a resounding success among preservationists and development stakeholders as well as its end-users – including locals and tourists alike. That’s because it’s a great way to experience and interact with Cornwall, Griffith said: it’s a menacingly momentous space that feels low-key and luxurious.
With current peak rates around £350 per night for the year-end holidays, guests also get access to modern amenities such as a cocktail bar, gym and café. The next stage of development underway is a glass pavilion that will add a swimming pool and spa.
The hotel is like any other five-star experience when it comes to comforts: crisp lines and plush carpeted corridors; warm lighting fixtures and cool, intricate textures; fresh linens and inviting aromas.
But as sure as a sentence, guests won’t forget they’re in a former prison.
The Twelve team went to great lengths to ensure one never loses the “feeling” that comes from awareness of the site’s bleak history. “That’s quite important in terms of the heritage side of things,” Griffith added.
Attractions like the Dark Walk usher guests through murky, cinematically lit tunnels and bring them up close to “the only original, fully working Victorian Hanging Pit remaining in the United Kingdom”, according to the jail’s website. Ghost stories run rampant at the site. Prisoners’ graffiti still lingers on sections of the walls.
Much of the original structure remains. Architects used original cell doors when they could, along with salvaged doors from Wandsworth Prison, a historic – but still open – prison. Each guest suite lies within the original footprint of a group of three cells. One cell comprises the bathroom area, and the two adjacent cells comprise the rest of the room, with a section of the 600-millimetre-thick stone walls between them cut out. “In the room, there's still that feeling of how big a cell would be,” Griffith said.
Windows were kept as is – bars and all. “From the outside, you get a very strong view of the jail bars,” she continued. Inside, it’s a double-glazed window that opens. “When you're in the room, it does give you this kind of unique feeling because you've just got these tiny little windows up high, and you haven't got a great view out, but you might see a bird in the morning, chirping on the window ledge.”
Given the scope of the project, interventions were minimal, she continued. Lots of sections of the walls needed repair. But most of the stonework, beat up by 50 years of weathering, needed only to be dried out, cleaned and sealed. The one metre-thick exterior walls needed new breathable, single-layer insulation, and the interior needed an air-handling unit.
Lifts made the whole place accessible. Utilities other than sprinklers and fire alarms needed to be run under a riser or surface mounted, with small plaster trimmings hiding the cables, given that the stone walls were simply impenetrable.
The missing sections of the roof got new life as glazed atria in the same place they once were, letting natural light pour in.
The biggest intervention came in repairing the flooring, which had to be patched and reinforced.
It was quite a task, Griffith said of the nearly seven-year-long project. Her team served as the lead consultant, architect and master planner. Arup handled the engineering, along with Astute Fire. Montagu Events were the planning and heritage consults; TPI was the project and cost manager; Sarner International was the attraction consultant, and C-Field was the main contractor.
“With a project of this magnitude,” Griffith said, “sometimes it flows and you’re feeling really good about it, and other times you're thinking it just feels like one problem after another to have to solve.”
But in the end, she continued, “it was worth it”.