Clink Prison Museum is located on the very spot where he once housed the infamous dungeon in England - at Clink Street. A stone's throw from the museum - a wall remaining from the ancient palace of Winchester, and this is not surprising: after all, the prison was almost at the palace.

The residence of the Archbishop of Winchester, built in the XII century, includes many buildings for different purposes, including a small prison. It was a camera with zareshёchennym window in the basement and was intended for the heretics. Subsequently, the prison greatly expanded to take common criminals. Her name - Klink - there are believed to be from the sound of slamming doors or metal chains, which are shackled prisoners. Gradually the word came to mean in English any jail or prison cell.

Clink Prison conditions were appalling, prisoners tortured, beaten, tortured, punished for misdemeanors and just. However, the rich prisoners paid jailers and those dissatisfied with salary, allowed for a bribe everything - a single room, bed, bed linen, candles, lightweight shackles. For a fee, you can remove the chains in general, and to go out to beg or to work. The poor, because of the lattices begging from passers-by or sell their clothes to buy food from the prison guards. In such a prison existed for hundreds of years, and only in 1776 it burnt down during the rebellion of Lord Gordon.

Clink Prison is no more, but at the museum argue that carefully restored her appearance. The visitor goes down into the basement and bypasses half black prison facilities - cameras, torture, punishment cells. Wax dolls depict prisoners, pulling his hands out of the arrays awaiting torture or sitting in the "hole" - a hole with dirty water from the Thames, where only his head sticking out. (This "hole" feared by all the prisoners, few returned alive out of it.) Everywhere apart torture instruments. Sound recording quiet moans. Explanatory signs dispassionately and in detail tell about something terrible: for example, the execution, introduced by Henry VIII, - boiled criminals alive.

While many tourists have fun, photographed in the role of executioners and victims, visiting the museum as a whole - not the family an ordinary walk. So that parents with young children should think about before you go to the museum at the Clink Street.