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- [00:03]
A
Prisons are environments that are designed to strip identity away completely. And individuality, anything that you can do to give that back, it becomes more significant than we on the outside can possibly imagine. Just being able to flick that switch and put your own light on and turn it off, you know, is huge. If we take a group of already damaged people and surround them with ugliness and brutality, what do we expect, you know, what are going to be the consequences of that? It seems blindingly obvious to me. When I visited my friend Nick in prison, I thought about what I was going to wear, and I wore a cashmere jumper because I knew that when we saw each other, we would hug each other. And it was something that went through my mind that actually he. He gets so little opportunity to feel softness on his hands. Hello.
- [01:01]
B
Welcome back to Homing. Today's guest is professor Yvonne Jukes, who's one of the world's leading experts on prison architecture. For decades now, she studied the environments we create for punishment. The echoing corridors, metal doors, and harsh fluorescent lighting of prisons and the effect that those spaces have on the people who live inside them. Her work is rooted in the idea that buildings shape us emotionally as well as physically. Things like light, acoustics, and levels of privacy all affect the nervous system and can either deepen despair or create the conditions for healing. But this conversation is also very personal. Yvonne talks about restoring a crumbling Regency townhouse a over the course of more than a decade, only for her partner to leave her. Midway through the project, the house became tangled up with grief, perfectionism, and the slow unraveling of the relationship itself. We explore the strange overlap between prisons and homes. So the human need for dignity, sanctuary, and control over our surroundings, and also the instinct to create beauty even in the bleakest places. I really love reading Yvonne's memoir, which is called An Architecture of Hope, and it weaves together architecture, psychology, and home in a very personal way. And I also really enjoyed this conversation, which very much felt like a continuation of those ideas. Here it is, and I hope you enjoy it, too.
- [02:35]
C
Hi, Yvonne.
- [02:36]
A
Hi.
- [02:36]
C
Welcome to Homing. Really appreciate you being here. So you're a professor of criminology and an expert on prison architecture, which I think is fascinating. And I would just love to make the link today between prisons and homes, which is an unlikely one, but something that you've pulled off in a brilliant book that you've written called An Architecture of Hope. So my first question is a question I ask so many people. What does that word home mean to you personally?
- [03:03]
A
When I think of the word Home. I immediately think of sanctuary, probably because my home for a very long time wasn't a place of sanctuary. So I write in An Architecture of Hope about my relationship with a house that I was renovating for a very long time.
- [03:22]
C
How long's a long time?
- [03:23]
A
Well, with my ex partner, 11 years. And then an additional three years after that when I took it on and did it by myself. Crikey, it was a long time to live on a building site and you know, with all the chaos and stress that that involves, the, the dirt, the dust, tools everywhere, strangers traipsing in and out all the time. The loft access to the house was in my bedroom. And I remember one particularly awful day when at 8 o' clock in the morning, this builder just burst into my bedroom while I was still in bed. So the house was far from a sanctuary. And it was kind of quite a difficult time really looking back on it. And I think it helped me to realize that home isn't just the place that we live, it shapes our emotional life as well. And I guess that was the foundation of the book that I wrote. So sanctuary, definitely, but also my home is a place of creativity. So two years ago I moved to Bath and I live on my own in a sort of worker's cottage built in about 1890. And it feels very private. It's down a little private road, so there are no cars going past. It's a writer's parad, really. It feels very safe and secure and it's a place of fertile solitude for me really. And you know, it's filled with books and art and objects that I've picked up from around the world. And it's a place that allows me to think and write and be creative and just be myself.
- [05:10]
C
I love fertile solitude. That's a really nice expression. I mean, the obvious question here is why did it take 11 years plus however many more to renovate?
- [05:20]
A
You'd have to ask my ex partner that. When we bought the house, we knew it was a complete renovation project. At one time it had been a student let multi way let, so it'd been quite badly vandalized over the years. It was a 200-year-old townhouse, Regency townhouse in Cheltenham, and we were a bit gung ho, a bit, possibly a bit too ambitious about what we could achieve. But part of the issue was that my partner was a perfectionist and very, very meticulous and he wanted to do everything with absolute historical integrity. So, you know, he would mix his own lime plaster with horse hair in it. And all that kind of thing. And he was just slow, methodical to the point of painfulness, really. Looking back, I don't know why I sort of stood by and allowed that to unfold quite as slowly as it did. But I was very busy. I was working full time in order to pay for the renovation, and I was spending a lot of time working abroad. So I sort of took my eye off the ball a little bit. But it became quite a stressful environment because it was a building site, but it also became a bit of a battleground. You know, I was constantly thinking my life would be perfect if only the house was finished. And so anything that went wrong in other aspects of my life, you know, everything would be all right if only the house got finished. And it never did. And so after 11 years, my partner bailed out. I think the project overwhelmed him, and he bailed out of the restoration and he bailed out of the relationship as well and left me with this house that he'd dismantled. He had this idea, he'd once heard that Terence Conran said that when you move into a new house, you should paint the whole thing white so you've got a blank canvas. And he took that to extremes, and he sort of wanted to see the skeleton of the house in order to then, you know, rebuild it. But he was better at deconstruction than construction or reconstruction, let's put it that way.
- [07:31]
C
Oh, God.
- [07:31]
A
Yeah. And so when he left, I was left with one room was finished, and there were other rooms that were partly finished, but there were whole areas of the house that were still uninhabitable. And, yeah, it took me another two or three years.
- [07:48]
C
So how did that change your relationship with the home, then the marriage breakdown? How did you then view the home as a place to live?
- [07:56]
A
I'd always had a feeling of that house being a kind of monster that had to be tamed. So from day one, I felt as if there was trauma in the walls. And I don't think that's a huge surprise in a 200-year-old house. You know, there will have been many, many births and deaths that have taken place, but there was something about it. I just felt like it had a sort of malevolent personality. Oh, wow. But when I was left on my own with it. I sound slightly mad, I know, but I sort of wanted a reconciliation with it. And I think actually both my part really had a strong sense of being passing visitors in this 200-year-old house. You know, we were custodians and we Wanted to do right by it, you know, and we did. We made it beautiful. It was probably structurally more sound and possibly more beautiful than when it was first built in 1825. But that came at a cost to both of us and to me. And I think I could really see this sort of mirroring of the undoing of the house and the undoing of our relationship.
- [09:07]
C
So interesting. In your book you talk about when you were a child, am I right in saying you lived in quite a humble way as a family and you were quite jealous of some of your friends houses? Right, tell us about that.
- [09:19]
A
Well, I mean my dad was a professional, you know, he was a building society manager at the time, but we didn't have a huge amount of money. I grew up in a, in a sort of 1970s semi and then. And eventually they moved to a detached house and that was seen as the kind of the height but on an estate. And I went to a school which had been a grammar school. When I went there it just briefly become a comprehensive and then it became a grammar independent school again. But it was I guess the best non fee paying school in Peterborough. So a lot of people who are better off than my parents sent their kids there and I guess that's where I first started to become interested in architecture and where I first understood that homes are not just the place we live. They say something about us, they say something about our place, our status in life and yeah, I write in the book about a friend who had a terraced house which was on five or six floors and it was absolutely beautiful. Her father was a professional photographer and the whole family were very artistic and just the light that came through the, you know, the sort of the leaded windows or whatever. And I remember there were these gorgeous oriental rugs and you know, for a kid who grew up in a house, I don't want to do it down. You know, I had a pretty happy childhood but you know, Marks and Spencers were seen as the height of luxury and we had. You're probably not old enough to remember but there was bedding and curtains that they did which were these sort of huge yellow flowers. And you know, it was just different. It was a different kind of aesthetic and aesthetic landscape. But I knew from that early age that I wanted to aspire to something like this friend had.
- [11:23]
C
It's interesting that, isn't it, that we understand the status involved even from such a young age in a house. There's a Margaret Forster book, I think it's called My Life and Houses or something. Like that, where she talks about. Exactly that. She talks about these houses on this particular street near where she grew up. And she just knew she wanted one of those houses and she imagined her bedroom upstairs and it was going to overlook an apple tree. And it's somehow about wanting to clamber out of whatever situation you're in, I think, isn't it?
- [11:53]
A
Yeah. And sort of expand your mind, broaden your horizons. And the fact that you think you can do that through buildings is, you know, and understand that from a very young age is quite interesting.
- [12:06]
C
Exactly, yeah. So let's come on to prisons then. How did you get into the world of criminology? And why are you interested in prisons in the first place?
- [12:15]
A
I was a media student, actually, I was an English student first and then I did a master's in mass communications research and I became interested in family viewing. There were studies that were done at the time that showed that television can be a bit of a battleground in households. And at that time it was found that the male head of the household tended to have control of the remote control and decide what to watch. And also the conditions within it was what, you know, this was very. If my dad wanted to watch something on TV and he wanted silence, then there would be silence. And then followed by the male children, then female children, and last of all by the woman. So even if the woman had paid work outside the home, she was very often reduced to watching her programs on a grainy black and white screen in the kitchen while she cooked everyone's tea. And that kind of the power dynamic, the way the power flows through the household I just thought was really interesting. And just through a chance conversation with colleagues one day I started to wonder how that would play out in prisons. Because at that time prisons had TV rooms, they had an association room with one television. And I wondered how access and control was negotiated. You know, was it the biggest, the hardest, you know, who decided what to watch? So that was the genesis of my PhD. I went to Cambridge University to the Institute of Criminology and I had a fantastic supervisor who is now a good friend, Alison Liebling. She is one of the most well known prison experts in the world. She's not terribly interested in television, but that didn't matter. She got me access to lots of prisons. But just as I was starting my research in cell television was introduced and that changed everything because prisoners could now have a TV in their cell. It was part of what is called the incentives and earned privileges scheme. So they had to earn the right to have A television, and then they would only keep their TV through Compliant behav. So that created a whole different dynamic. So that's how I got into prisons. And yeah, the architecture stuff came later.
- [14:32]
C
And in your opinion, can a prison ever feel like a home?
- [14:37]
A
It's a really fascinating question and it's one that I've talked about with my friend Nick, who I'm currently writing a book with. The book is called Knowing Nick and it's about his life. He and I had ostensibly very similar backgrounds, so his family home, which he's taken me to see, he's in a category D prison now. He's been in prison for 21 years in total, but he's just coming to the end, hopefully of a sentence minimum. It's a life sentence minimum recommendation, four years. He's been in almost nine years now.
- [15:14]
C
What did he do?
- [15:14]
A
Allegedly he did a number of armed robberies on co ops. Mostly he was a heroin addict, which was what drove him to commit crimes. But because he's now in a cat D open prison, he gets home leave sometimes. So a few weeks ago I went up there and he showed me the area that he grew up in, including his home, his family home, where he grew up. And that was all very interesting. But the book that we're writing together is actually about how two people with ostensibly quite similar backgrounds ended up taking these very different paths. Me, a criminology professor, Nick, heroin addict and armed robber. So the book is about his life in crime and his life in prison. I mean, there are lots of interesting things about him, one of which was that when George Michael was sentenced to a few weeks in prison, Nick was assigned as his peer mentor. Oh, really? Yeah. But in relation to home, Nick has said to me that it's vital to think of prison as home. For many prisoners at least, to not do so would be detrimental to one's mental health. And I think for those of us that have never been incarcerated, that's quite a difficult thing to sort of think about and come to terms with. Sometimes he'll call me when he's on his way out of work. He works shifts out in. So he works till 10 o'. Clock. And he'll call me on his way back and he'll say, I'm on my way home and he means back to the prison.
- [16:52]
C
Wow.
- [16:52]
A
And I wince every time. But, you know, it's just his view that thinking of prisoners home isn't a luxury, it's a necessity. Having said that, I write in the book about Harry Roberts, the notorious police Killer who I interviewed many years ago. He ended up spending 48 years in prison, which is an extraordinary long time. And he said that he never made his cell like home because he always wanted to think of himself as just transitioning through. And to decorate it, to personalize it, would indicate that they had won, you know, that the powers that be had sort of got won over on him. And when I mentioned that to Nick, he said, actually, in the prison that he's in, he sees that lifers often don't make their cells homelike as much as other prisoners. There might be a correlation between length of sentence and personalization of cells.
- [17:59]
C
It's really interesting, isn't it? What are some of the ways that you have seen prisoners personalize their cells?
- [18:04]
A
They're quite limited in what they can do, really, because there's this thing called volumetric control. They have to be able to put all their belongings in. In two boxes of quite limited dimensions. And they're not allowed their own bedding and that kind of thing anymore. They can obviously have some objects. Listening to music would be one way of personalizing their space. And also photographs. You know, prisoners put photos on the wall, and Nick described it as a kind of analog Instagram. So there's a performative aspect to that. People curate their photographs quite carefully, and they use to show the side of themselves that they want to show others, as well as things that are personally meaningful to them.
- [18:52]
C
Fascinating. You've written about a prison in Scotland. Is it called Caunton Vale?
- [18:57]
A
Corn Vale, yeah.
- [18:58]
C
Which was closing down, right?
- [19:00]
A
Yeah.
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C
And because it was closing down, there were fewer prisoners. And I believe, therefore, some of them could personalize it a bit more heavily.
- [19:06]
A
That's right. The atmosphere was quite relaxed by the time I went there. And it was Scotland's national prison for women. And it was only about a third full. So they just had the prisoners that were needed to keep the prison going, basically. And, yeah, it was a very relaxed atmosphere, and that extended to the cells. So the women had gone to extraordinary lengths to claim their space, and they'd done that through decoration. And I remember one woman took me into her room and showed me this extraordinarily intricate embroidered bedspread that she'd made. It was absolutely beautiful. But the really interesting thing that they'd done was to flout every health and safety rule going. The cells had these sort of goldfish bowl light fixtures, which had a very harsh blue white light. And the women had got hold of some tissue paper, colored tissue paper, and covered the fixtures with this paper. So the light was diffused, and it gave a sort of nice lilac glow or whatever. And also by their beds, they had little cubbyholes cut out, and they'd got hold of some small lamps and put them in the cubbyholes to create the kind of mood lighting. And honestly, the effect was. It was very ikea, but it really did demonstrate the importance of claiming space and making it a home.
- [20:45]
C
Yeah. Lighting's such a big one, I think, isn't it? I think you said another prisoner painted her cell bright yellow.
- [20:53]
A
Yeah, yeah. I mean, prisons are fairly bleak environments. And I used to always ask people in prison, what color is prison? And nearly all of them said grey, even in inverted commas. Nice Scandinavian prisons, most people said grey. So for her to decorate her cell in bright yellow, she was allowed her own bedding there. So everything was yellow. And for her it was sunshine, it was joy. It was a kind of act of resistance, actually, I think, to all the greyness, the bleakness.
- [21:29]
C
Given that they are grey and given that they are, you know, they have echoing acoustics and hard materials and so on, they're very unhomely, as it were. What do you think is the psychological effect of that on a prisoner that you've seen sort of firsthand?
- [21:48]
A
I think the idea of architecture as a kind of nervous system regulator is a really interesting one. I suspect that we can all relate to it. You know, if you have noisy neighbors, any kind of intrusion of noise that you have no control over I think can have quite an impact on your equilibrium. And, you know, as you say, prisons are. They're very harsh places. There's no softness in a prison. The noise is hard, the surfaces are hard. They're quite alien environments, really. Really. I'm not a psychologist, but it seems sort of common sense to me that that would have an impact on the nervous system and on people psychologically. And I guess that's why the cell is so important, because that's the sort of backstage area where people can take refuge and make it like home, tune out of the prison culture, have respite from being front stage. And as you can imagine, in men's prisons in particular, being front again, a very kind of performative process, you know. And in prison, your senses are heightened all the time. You're hyper aware of everything that's going on around you, and that's exhausting. So actually, to have a home like cell that you can retreat to, a sanctuary, and again, it's a process of restoration, you know, restore yourself, I think, is really important. And actually I've done lot of work over the last couple of decades helping to design prisons around the world to be rehabilitative, healing places, as opposed to purely punitive. And when I work with architects on prison designs, it tends to be the cell that I particularly focus on. And my message is always, let's try and get this as close to a domestic environment as we possibly can.
- [23:54]
C
So, interesting. The prison officers, do they have similar kinds of quarters to retreat to? I mean, are we talking about similar grayness and hard surfaces and so on? Does that have an effect on them, do you think?
- [24:10]
A
That's, again, a big question. Of course it has an effect on them. You know, many of them are in prison almost as long as prisoners and perhaps over a much longer period of time. So if you're in an environment where you only ever see razor wire and bars on windows and cracked lino on floors and everything is grey and ugly, it is bound to have an effect not only on you and your interiority and your emotional life, but also on the way that you view the people in your career. Nick has talked to me about the way that officers sometimes weaponize both space and noise. So when they have to do a cell search, some officers will be respectful and careful and treat it as the prisoner's home. Others will deliberately dismantle it and sort of take it apart, you know, as a way of showing who's boss, who's in power. Noyes as well, he says that particularly at the end of their shift, officers will unnecessarily slam doors. And, you know, those kinds of design cues are really important. So the cat D prison that Nick is in now, he was telling me that just having carpet tiles in the corridor outside makes a huge difference. It softens the noise, softens the acoustics. And he's got a wooden door, a timber door, as opposed to a metal door. Again, he says that makes a huge difference. But the other thing about officers, in relation to your question, is it's a really tricky one. I always say to architects that I work with, look after the staff first. Start with the staff, because if you've got a happy workforce, a workforce that feels like a professionalised, valued body, you're more likely to get good results right across the prison. So it's important to give staff areas where they also can tune out of the prison culture. You know, they don't need bars on the windows of their staff canteen, for example.
- [26:24]
C
Do they even get a staff canteen sometimes?
- [26:26]
A
No, very often not. In fact, again, I talk in the book about the fact that recently built prisons in this country. Somehow the architects have forgotten to give the staff a canteen. Sometimes they'll have little breakout spaces, kitchens, and sometimes they're given offices. The problem with that is that staff can become quite diffident and they can retreat to their offices, and then they're not out mixing with prisoners and getting to know them. You know, criminologists call it dynamic security, where you're sort of forming interpersonal relationships with people. That's really the best kind of security. But if you've got an office that staff can retreat to and lock the door, that's not really good for anybody. So, yeah, it's. It's quite a complex picture, though. You know, there are lots of things to think about.
- [27:23]
C
Yeah, yeah. A lot of the people listening to this will be familiar with the idea that you can be sensitive to your environment in some way. So what you're saying, I think will resonate with them and so are the guests, and I'm sure you are, which is why you do what you do. But, for example, Nigel Slater talked to me about how he gets terrible vertigo when he stands at the top of a staircase or at some kind of moving travelator or escalator or whatever. He also said that when he's going to a place that he hasn't been to before, he'll try and arrive early and he'll try and check out where the exits are because it makes him feel more psychologically safe. We all do these things. I've talked a lot about my own manias in this area on the podcast. But for you personally, what do you experience in the built environment? What problems do you come across in everyday life that trigger your nervous system in that way?
- [28:19]
A
I have exactly the same thing about stairs, particularly at tube stations. I get vertigo. It comes and goes. I didn't have it for quite a long time over the last few years, and recently it's come back. I don't know why. I never had it before. The restoration project on the house in Cheltenham, and I think that was probably because the floors were missing. So there were times when you could be at the top of the house and see all the way down to the basement.
- [28:50]
C
Okay.
- [28:50]
A
And, you know, for quite significant periods, it was quite a dangerous place to live. And I remember, again I mention it in the book, my friend Jules came one Christmas and I opened the front door and then we had to walk the plank. We had to walk along this skinny, and you could just see down this void to the basement below. So I rationalize it. You Know, I intellectualize my vertigo. I think that, you know, there are reasons why sometimes when I stand at the top of the stairs at tube stations, you know, the floor sort of rushes up at me. Aside from that, I'm really aware of the way that architecture affects me. And I think, again, this is the genesis of my research and the book that I wrote. So I've worked at a number of universities where there's been quite a mixed economy of architecture. And I'm very aware at Hull University, for example, of the difference that I feel when I'm in the red brick Victorian building where all the management offices are compared to the sort of rather brutalist concrete tower that my office was in. I'm not saying one is better than the other, but it's quite interesting. Actually. My last job was at the University of Bath. And I think a lot of people probably arrive at the University of Bath thinking that the campus is going to be all sort of honey colored palisades or something. And it's not. It's a brutalist monument. It was, as you'll know, designed by Alison and Peter Smithson and opened in 1966. I like it, you know, I like the brutalism. I think it's a bit unfortunate that it's been added onto in so many ways over the years. So Smithson's original vision doesn't really make any sense now. You know, it's sort of been bastardized. But, you know, I am aware of the sort of the effect that architecture has on me all the time. And I think environment matters, design matters, and that's why I started to wonder, how would it affect people in prison? I mentioned in An Architecture of Hope the Irish poet and philosopher John o', Donoghue, who, in a conversation about urban planning, said that he felt that the poor are doubly impoverished because of the ugliness that often surrounds them. He said it's very difficult to reach and sustain gentleness in such environments. And that really spoke to me and spoke to me in relation to prisons, because I think if we take what are essentially already mostly very damaged people and we put them in an environment that is ugly, bleak, brutal, barbaric, how can we expect them to be able to conjure up a different version of their lives? You know, how can they imagine a better future? And the converse is true as well. I think, you know, if we gave people in prison environments to invest in emotionally and to inspire, you know, they might be able to aspire to a different kind of future. That might sound a bit fanciful. But I do believe it. Yeah.
- [32:12]
C
I think this is so interesting, isn't it? And this is the kind of heart of your manifesto, as it were. And I'm sure some people will think, and you must come across this a lot, where people will push back on that and say, well, they've done bad things, so they don't deserve it. They don't deserve a pleasant environment. They don't deserve to be rehabilitated in that way. What would you say to that?
- [32:36]
A
I've spent about 30 years in prisons and, well, I know that the loss of liberty is everything. Having your freedom taken away from you is all important. So to design spaces that add despair and degradation and alienation on top of that seems to me just a profoundly uncivilized thing to do. And I think if we want to think of ourselves as a civilized society, we really need to address this. And, you know, I rarely leave a prison without thinking that but for the grace of God go I, or any of us. I truly believe that any of us could end up in prison or someone we love could. And then that immediately puts a very different complexion on things. You know, what kinds of people do we want leaving prison? In Scandinavia, they take release very seriously because the vast majority of prisoners will come back out into society and their attitude is they will be our neighbors. And who do we want as our neighbors? You know, I always say this. Who would we want sitting on the bus next to our daughter? Someone who's been further harmed and brutalized by their environment, or someone who has been rehabilitated and healed by their environment and feels that they have an investment in themselves and their future and in society? To me, that kind of seems like a no brainer, really.
- [34:17]
C
Absolutely. If you were incarcerated yourself personally,
- [34:26]
B
How
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C
do you think you would deal with that? As someone who's described themselves as sensitive to environment, do you think you'd be able to get through it? What do you think? Having been, you know, you've obviously immersed yourself in it quite a lot. So more than most. So you know what it means. What do you reckon?
- [34:41]
A
Hell is other people, right? You know, I think it might be not being surrounded by other prisoners, but just being surrounded by other people all the time, I think I would find really difficult. I'd like to think that if I was imprisoned, I would do something constructive with my time. Write a book. They don't make that easy. I mean, you know, as I am currently writing a book with a serving prisoner, he doesn't have a laptop or anything in prison. You know, his contributions to the book are written in pen in a notebook, which is a very, very slow, laborious process and frustrating for him. For me, it would depend what prison I was in. So I think in a way I'm backtracking slightly on what I said, that loss of liberty is everything. I mean, I do believe that. But for me, the environment would make a difference. I think I could be wrong about that. I've done a lot of research at Halden Prison in Norway, which is the prison that's universally held up as the model prison. Very expensive to build, it's very expensive to run. It's, in many ways is a beautiful environment. And the prisoners that I've spoken to there have said, yes, it's all very well, you know, it is lovely, nice, you know, architecturally and so on. But unlike you, I can't walk out at 5 o', clock, you know, I can't phone my kids whenever I want to. So to some extent, a prison is a prison, is a prison. But I actually don't think you can imagine how you would cope with imprisonment until you face it. And I doubt I would do very well, actually, unless I could carve out that fertile solitude.
- [36:34]
C
Exactly. That's the thing, isn't it? As you say, it's somehow the independence from the barrage that's going on around you, I would imagine, is the hardest thing. You've mentioned that the Scandinavian prisons, as you say, they are held up as better examples of prisons in terms of design. What do they do differently then?
- [36:56]
A
I think the main thing they do differently is think about what happens when people are released, let back into society. All the things that make up a humane environment, a human environment, nature, nice landscapes, art, culture, education, contact with families, you know, all these small things that make a huge difference, they take seriously and they have this principle of what is known as normalization. So it's a given that prisons take away your freedom, but the view is that they shouldn't inflict further punishment on top of that. So people go to prison as punishment, not for punishment. And so this is enshrined in law in many countries in northern Europe that prisons should approximate normal conditions on the outside as far as possible. So, for example, with a new prison, as with any civic building in Norway, for example, Denmark, wherever 1% of the capital build project has to be spent on art. So that can typically be £250,000 on a prison. Prison. Oh, wow, that makes a difference, you know, So I think that's probably the main thing, that kind of principle of normalization, having Said all that. I'll return to my earlier point, which is that, you know, Halden is a high security prison. And if I was a male high security prisoner, of course, yes, I would much rather be at Halden than in Pentonville or Wormwood Scrubs or even Oslo prison for that matter. But I think there's a danger in over romanticizing Scandinavian prisons. And in fact, Nordic countries have taken quite significant steps back from the kind of humane environment that Halden is. And Bastoy, the island prison, is the other famous one in Norway. The prisons they're building now look much more like the kinds of prisons that we build in the uk, but actually by far the worst prison that I've been in. The only prison that I've ever felt scared in was Auckland prison in New Zealand. I was engaged to advise on the design of a replacement to the supermax Paramaremo it was called. It was designed by an architect, an American supermax architect. It was designed on the same principles as many notable notorious American supermax prisons.
- [39:48]
C
What does that mean, Supermax super.
- [39:51]
A
Maximum security. So not just maximum security, but a level above that. So typically thought of as housing the worst of the worst, kind of the end of the road. There was a wing called D wing, D unit, D block, I think, which was underground. It was literally subterranean, and it held the supermax prisoners. And it was a really scary environment. And I was there with this group of architects and corrections people, you know, all in their sort of white starched shirts and ties and suits. And we all felt quite green, actually. You know, a bit naive sort of being there. Just the smells and the sounds. It was like a movie. It was like Silence of the Lambs, you know, that was the feeling that it conjured up. Of course, all the guys there were locked up. There was no danger to us. But it felt like a really dangerous environment. And I left it thinking, what on earth does that do to your psyche for the people locked up in it and also working in really did feel like hell.
- [41:00]
C
Well, you're describing kind of an emotional energy in the place somehow, but it's also subterranean. But was there anything else about the. The design of it that was contributing to that?
- [41:15]
A
The darkness? There was obviously no natural light. It was a very harsh environment acoustically and visually. Absolutely no softness, no basic humanness. Actually, there were cages. These guys were locked up in cages. It's become a cliche to sort of say, you know, you wouldn't keep your dog in an environment like that, but you genuinely wouldn't. It was horrible.
- [41:46]
C
That's a scary thought, isn't it? Really is.
- [41:49]
A
And actually, the prison that they've ended up with is no better, in my view. It's very different. It's light, it's bright. It feels. Feels like a concrete bunker, but above ground. But it's sort of. It's like a sensory deprivation chamber. You know, there's nothing to stimulate the senses. There's nothing to stimulate curiosity, which I think is very important for human beings. Everything's on the same level. You never have to, you know, go up an incline or walk upstairs or anything. And, you know, for a lot of the prisoners there, there's artificial light in their cells, and it's kept on 24 hours a day. It's torture, horror.
- [42:31]
C
But, Yvonne, if someone has been the subject of a really awful crime, or a family member of theirs has, and they really want to see that person suffer and brought to justice, is that not fair that they should feel that. That that person should be in inherently not a very nice environment that, like you're describing. Why do they deserve better? This is the big question, isn't it? Why do they deserve any more if they've done that to me or the person that I love, you know?
- [43:02]
A
Yeah. It's a really hard question to answer because it's such a personal thing. I've always found it quite odd when you see, you know, in America, people on death row, when people are executed and the families of their victims are invited to come and watch them at the point of death. It doesn't feel like an impulse that I would feel that, you know, I would want to do. But you don't know unless you, you know, I haven't been in those people's circumstances, their shoes. So I can't say. All I think is that I don't believe in an eye for an eye. I think, you know, it's why I don't believe in the death penalty. Yeah, there's something very uncivilized and unhuman about wanting to inflict suffering on another person.
- [43:58]
C
I want to move on to talk about some specific design principles in relation to prisons, but also the home. And what can we learn that might apply to both places, actually, starting with light, for example. We've mentioned light briefly, but do you have certain specific thoughts or rules somehow around light that you think should be the basics for a prison, but also what's your relationship like with light at home?
- [44:29]
A
I think natural daylight is really important. It's important for our mental health. It's probably important for our physical health. Circadian Rhythms. Sleep is a big problem in prisons for a whole variety of reasons. So it's really important that people get natural daylight during the day and complete darkness at night. I like a lot of kind of, I like mood lighting, I like spotlights, I like lots of different kinds of lights at home. So I can change the lighting. I like to be able to light the fire, have flames, flickering candlelights. I think all these are actually markers of my well being. And I've seen in prison that even people who don't have much money will save up to buy a table lamp so that they don't have the harsh glare of a ceiling lamp.
- [45:25]
C
So can they turn the ceiling light off if they want to?
- [45:28]
A
Yeah, the vast majority can. And actually Limerick Women's Prison, which I helped to design, I talked to the architects there about the importance of light and the importance of having autonomy and choice in lighting. I would have loved them to be able to have fitted dimmer switches, but they couldn't. For some safety reason they couldn't. But what they did do was fit a sort of dark indigo blue light as well as the normal white light. So the women have the choice between the two. So at night or in the evening they can put this dark blue light on. The architects had done some research into some psychology studies which showed that this dark blue light had some sort of beneficial effect on people's well being. But you know, that just that one little thing, giving them choice, because, you know, prisons are environments that are designed to strip identity away completely and individuality. And so anything that you can do to give that back, I think it becomes more significant than we on the outside can possibly imagine. Just being able to flick that switch and put your own light on and turn it off, you know, is huge. So, yeah, light is really important as it is to all of us. I mean, it's just a kind of basic human need, isn't it? We're told that we sleep better if we go for a walk for 20 minutes first thing in the morning. It's good for our health. And that applies to people in prison just as it does on the outside.
- [47:06]
C
Yeah, yeah. When are they allowed outside then, generally? How does that work again?
- [47:11]
A
It varies from prison to prison, from category to category. You know, my friend Nick spends quite a lot of time outside now because he goes out to work. It's very sweet. Actually. He was cycling to work, he's bought a car now, he works in Derby and it's, I think it's about a 45 minute cycle ride. And he sent Me a little video one night of him and his mother cycling back to the prison from work in a blizzard. It was snowing really heavily. He said it was the first time he'd experienced Snow in about 22 years. When you hear things like that, it's quite poignant. But in kind of conventional, say cat B, cat C. Medium security, high security prison exercise will be taken at particular times of day in the yard. Generally a prison yard will have mesh covering it to prevent people throwing drugs or mobile phones or whatever. Over. So even on a beautiful sunny day like today when the sky is blue, you're looking at it through this steel mesh.
- [48:21]
C
Well, that brings us on to nature then. I mean, what kind of. Do they get any connection to nature really, the natural world?
- [48:28]
A
Some do, yeah. I always think that planting, landscaping is important in prisons because if you've got trees and plants, it attracts butterflies and bees. You don't get many small animals often in prisons, squirrels and rabbits and things because there's a huge great wall around them. But a lot of prisons have therapeutic gardens now and I've been, been quite instrumental in pushing those.
- [49:04]
C
Why have you pushed those?
- [49:06]
A
Because I think gardens again are just good for us. And therapeutic gardens often have herbs and kind of strong smelling plants again that might attract bees and butterflies and they can just be places of calm and again, sanctuary, refuge in prisons. The problem is that very often prisons don't have the staff to escort prisoners to them. So it's very common, even at Halden actually in Norway, for the therapeutic garden to remain locked up and unused. Yeah, but often, you know, they'll have water features. There are some prisons in this country that have got really nice gardens. Earlstoke is one that's quite near me in the southwest and it's got different housing units. Units. But outside one of them is a duck pond and there are two families of ducks that have made it their home and the prisoners look after it really well. And there's beautiful planting all around, hanging baskets, you name it. And that does soften the prison environment and it just makes it feel more again, more normal and more pleasant to enable habit.
- [50:25]
C
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. What about materials?
- [50:29]
A
Again, you can imagine that prisons are metal, mostly concrete, tarmac. You know, this all adds to the sort of the grayness of them.
- [50:43]
C
Yeah, they're gray, they're hard, they're man made, they're not tactile, toxic materials.
- [50:49]
A
Very often there's not much, again not much softness, but also not much difference in texture, not much variability and variance in Terms of different levels of horizons or different materials that things are made of. When I visited my friend Nick in prison, I thought about what I was going to wear. And I wore a cashmere jumper because I knew that when we saw each other, we would hug each other. And it was something that went through my mind that actually he gets so little opportunity to feel softness on his hands. I love that, you know, just something that I thought about. So, yeah, materials are exactly what you'd anticipate them being. And again, I would imagine, not wholly good for people's mental health.
- [51:49]
C
Yeah, so difficult because how do we introduce softness to something when it has to be, you know, wiped clean and it has to be safe and has to be solid? It's really difficult, isn't it? Have you found ways to solve that one?
- [52:04]
A
Well, by domesticating the environment as much as possible. I think that prisoners should be allowed to have that own bedding, for example, but it has to meet a really high threshold of fire safety regulations. So in most prisons that's not possible. But, you know, like the women at Caughton Vale, things like rugs and cushions and bedspreads, blankets, you know, things that are comforting, soothing, become very important. And again, also, as I've said with the landscapes, you know, you can create soft landscape which go a long way to making an environment feel a bit more pleasant, a bit more homelike.
- [52:50]
C
And all this affects the acoustics as well, doesn't it? Because acoustics is such a big one, it seems to me it must be in a prison, but it is also at home, I think. How are you affected by acoustics in the home and how have you thought about it in the prison environment?
- [53:05]
A
My home is very quiet and I'm grateful for that. My home in Cheltenham actually wasn't. It was on quite a busy road and then there was a main road with a lot of traffic just kind of over to the right. And also because all the houses dated from the same period, they were all quite old, there was constant maintenance going on all around me, scaffolding going up and down all the time. And now I live in Bath and if ever I hear scaffolding go up, I find it almost a bit triggering. You know, again, it's that very sharp, harsh metallic noise and the noise of the workmen shouting at each other and all that kind of thing. So as a writer now, you know, as a full time writer and, you know, trying to develop a creative practice, quiet peacefulness is really important to me. I'd find that very difficult in prison. Nick often talks about the sort of torture of having to hear other people's music through the walls. And it's all like drum and bass and, you know, that kind of thing. So acoustics is important. Acoustics is particularly important in certain areas of the prison, like the visiting hall. So I've worked with some architects in Scotland, for example, who designed the ceiling of the visiting hall using the same design and materials as had been used at the Royal Ballet, I think.
- [54:42]
C
Okay.
- [54:44]
A
But very effective at muffling noise so that, you know, when you're sitting in a little group with your family, your loved ones, you can actually hear what's being said. Cause you can imagine in a visiting room where there are lots and lots of people and children running around and that kind of thing, you know, the noise can get a bit intolerable. So it's something that I think is super important and it's really crucial that that's thought about quite carefully in the design of new prisons.
- [55:11]
C
Yeah, I think acoustic design is so clever and it makes such a difference to people's lives, I feel. You know, just getting here today, for example, on the Northern Line, which is one of the old lines, you know, they're pretty resonant. It's quite a bombardment. The trains themselves as well are. But you know, the areas around the platforms and then the bowels of the stations, you know, they're very clangy. Whereas you get on the Jubilee Line, which I did today, and it's a completely different world and it's so, so clever the way they've mediated the sound. And I. I sometimes talk about airports on the podcast as well. But, you know, I've said before, Terminal 5 at Heathrow, I think, is really, really brilliantly designed from an acoustic standpoint. Have you noticed that?
- [55:53]
A
Yeah, absolutely.
- [55:54]
C
Yeah, yeah. It makes such a difference, doesn't it?
- [55:56]
A
It does.
- [55:58]
C
So this word high hope, it's a fantastic word. And you've called your book an architecture of hope. Why have you called it that? And what does that expression mean to you?
- [56:10]
A
I actually borrowed the term architecture of hope from Maggie's Cancer Care Centre, which is a network of non clinical cancer care centres in the uk, but also there are some elsewhere in the world now that were started by the. The architects Maggie Keswick and Charles Jenks. Maggie was diagnosed with cancer in the 1990s, I think, and the rooms in Edinburgh Hospital where she had to have her chemotherapy, Jenks described them as a kind of architectural aversion therapy. And they came to the realization that if there was an architecture that helped you to live and gave you hope. It was not to be found in the standard hospital environment. So they came up with this blueprint for these extraordinary centers. And many Maggies are designed by very high profile sort of starchitects. Frank Gehry, Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, Zaha Hadid, many others. And they are, they're a kind of very different kind of space. Not one that heals physically perhaps, but certainly can heal emotionally and spiritually. And they're all linked by certain aesthetic qualities. So gardens, beautiful views, calmness, tranquility, domesticity. When you walk into any Maggie center, you're immediately confronted by a kitchen table and you can make yourself a cup of tea or whatever. And I think that's a really nice philosophy. So the aesthetic is domestic rather than clinical. And that I idea really struck me. If architecture can create hope in places associated with illness, could it possibly create the same in places associated with punishment? And that really became the foundation of all my work and the book. Can prisons be designed as places of hope? Because prisons typically are designed according to an architecture of despair. And again, I go back to that idea that if we take a group of already damaged people and surround them with ugliness and brutality, what do we expect? What are going to be the consequences of that? It seems blindingly obvious to me. So yeah, Maggie centers, I think are a really good blueprint for thinking about how environments shape us intellectually, emotionally, spiritually.
- [59:00]
C
Yeah, I couldn't agree more. The Maggie centres are absolutely fantastic, but they are also based around this idea of the kind of old fashioned water closet, aren't they? Or that, you know, that it's a place of dignity that you can retreat to and gather yourself and be in a private space. If you want to tell us about that.
- [59:18]
A
I think dignity is really important. I'm glad you brought that up. I think, you know, if prisons were designed to allow people to reclaim, reclaim dignity, wouldn't that make a huge difference? Because most people who end up in prison have had every scrap of dignity taken from them. And I think in reclaiming dignity you can also claim identity. You know, you can claim your own identity. And that seems to me to be all important. Yeah, everything about prison and shreds dignity. And so what does that leave you with in terms of a human being? A shell really. So wouldn't it be great if you could get one of these starchitects? Most of the ones I mentioned are dead unfortunately now, but a very high profile architect to design a prison according to those kinds of principles.
- [60:19]
C
Yeah, it hasn't happened yet. Has it?
- [60:22]
A
No, I think didn't Frank Gehry with some students from Yale University and he spent some time with them in Nordic prisons, looking at the kind of principles that influenced the architecture there. And I think he himself spent one night in a prison in America. The students came up with designs for more enlightened prisons, but none of them were actually realized, which is so often the case. You'll know Hilary Cottam.
- [60:54]
C
Oh, right.
- [60:55]
A
She designed something called the Learning Prison many years ago and again it had some influence in policy and politics, but it never actually got built. I don't know if it would ever be possible for an enlightened prison to actually be realized, but it would be very interesting to do it just once as an experiment.
- [61:17]
C
Well, that's it, isn't it? Because the Maggie centres are, let's be honest, they're slightly peripheral in the sense that they're built as sort of one offs. Aren't they kind of close other hospital, existing hospitals and they're not medical in the sense that you don't get treated in them.
- [61:31]
A
Exactly.
- [61:32]
C
There is sort of, there are space for cancer sufferers and their families to recuperate and to learn about their condition and so on. So there's something about that, isn't there, that they're kind of satellites almost and they're sort of showing what could be possible. That's how I see it. So I think that'd be such an interesting experiment. Even a satellite to a prison that somehow different, that shows a way forward.
- [61:57]
A
It could be a sort of halfway house or maybe even Category D prisons could be designed that way. We're a very long way from that. Category D prisons, in my view at the moment are the worst part of the prison estate. They should be the best, you know, they should be the easy bit. But because of the pressures on the system, they're getting stuff full of cats that see medium security prisoners and they're not really holding true to the ethos of being resettlement prisons, which, you know, is what they're supposed to be. But yeah, imagine if an open prison was designed along the same principles as a Magus Center. That could be quite revolutionary.
- [62:38]
C
Yeah, it really could. So my last question for you, Yvonne, is how would you summarize what studying prisons for so long long has really fundamentally taught you? And what do you think that we can sort of take away today that we might think about in relation to our homes? I know it's a difficult question but you know, making that link back to the home again.
- [63:03]
A
Yeah, I think my relationship with my home now is very different from how it's ever been. You know, home has often felt a bit fragile to me. Growing up as a child, it did. My father was an alcoholic, and so home was quite a volatile place sometimes, obviously with the house I ended up with my partner in being the sort of huge restoration project that it ended up as. My sense of home was quite disturbed, quite disrupted there. But now, you know, I'm in this. This house in Bath. It's like a doll's house, but it's beautiful. And, you know, I open my front door and there's Salisbury Hill right opposite me. And, you know, it is a place of sanctuary. The house that I wrote the book about ended up not being how I hoped it would be because it was never finished. You know, that was the thing that I really wanted for it. But there came a point when I realized that the amount of. Of time and money and patience it still required, I just had very limited reserves off. I'd sort of run out of all three by then. And I began to realize, actually, that if I stayed there, the house would never release me. So, in a way, the story of the house was completed by the writing of the book. And in fact, I had a really peculiar attachment to that house. I mean, you'll get that from the book, right? I really thought that I would never leave. I honestly believe that. And then a week after finishing writing An Architecture of Hope, I put the house up for sale. And I sort of took myself by surprise in that. But in a way, I think the three years that it took me to write that book was a kind of process of alchemy for me. It was a long process of separation. And by the time I finished writing, I was free. I sort of felt free of the house, and I realized that it was okay to let it go. And I think, you know, not only did it give me the story that it needed to give me, which I'm very grateful for, but I think it taught me that it's good to let things go. You know, it's good to know when to let things go. So whether that's a relationship or a home, a job, a career, or the writing, sometimes we just have to shed some baggage in order to make room for something new. And I think that's the thing that I've really learned from this whole process.
- [65:50]
C
So interesting. Thank you so much. It's been fantastic.
- [65:52]
A
My pleasure. I've really enjoyed it. Thank you, Matt.
- [65:57]
B
Thanks very much for listening.
- [65:58]
C
Hope you enjoyed it.
- [65:59]
B
A reminder that you can sign up to be a homing member on Patreon, which gets you access to behind the scenes home tours with our guests. If not, we're very happy to have you here. Of course, you can also show your support by leaving us a quick review on Apple or Spotify or perhaps a friendly comment on our YouTube channel. You'll find us at homingwithmat. This episode was produced by Pod Shop with music by Simeon Walker. Thanks again for being here and talk to you next time. Bye Bye.