Holloway

Between 1896 and 2016, HM Prison Holloway was one of the largest institutions in Europe holding female prisoners. It was a place where important support and social integration programmes were pioneered, but it also, understandably, holds traumatic memories for an awful lot of people. The trigger warnings at the start of this documentary, among them ‘includes sound recorded in prison’, will give you an idea of just how strongly those can affect people. Holloway will soon be torn down. Filmmakers Sophie Compton and Daisy-May Hudson, along with six former inmates, visited first to record some of its history.

If Compton’s name sounds familiar to you, that may be because of her work on multi-award winning documentary Another Body, which took on the subject of non-consensual deepfake pornography. She takes the same incisive yet sensitive approach to this film, which includes group therapy sessions with the former inmates and some painfully personal moments. All of these women have successfully moved on in their lives and are now in leadership roles of one sort or another, but they still carry a lot of trauma. It becomes apparent that at least some of them are doing this because they want to provide a voice for the other women who have not been this fortunate.

Standing in the courtyard just before the entrance to the main building, one of them remembers “This is where they took my hair.”

Prison officers will tell you that for every inmate, the first days are the hardest. One of the women recalls her journey there, recreated using a phone: the sliver of vision that she had through a window in the side of the prison van, in which other Londoners went about their lives unconcerned, as if nothing was wrong, and she contemplated the four years ahead of her with horror. For another, it was the smell of the place, which, she informs us, still lingers. She has nightmares about being back in a cell, hopes that visiting the ones she lived in might help put them to rest. All the cells are bare now apart from rusting bedframes. Assorted plants have made their wat in through cracks and crevices in the stonework. We are told that there used to be lots of different colours on the walls, all now whitewashed over, but in one cell the team discovers a painting of roses, and in others, real flowers grow.

There is a lot of history here. most notably, it was used to detain the leaders of the Suffragette movement. One can imagine what it might have felt like to them. One of the women here surprises the others with how calm she is about it all, but says that by the time she arrived she was alreafy used to violence; whatever she saw in prison, she’d seen worse on the streets. Another, the oldest in the group, was in and out many times, and treated it was a refuge when she needed to sober up and get away from the pressures of the wider world for a while. To others, however, it was immediately, inescapably distressing. The screams in the night. The sense of being abandoned to one’s fate. One says that she has never felt safe in a group, and there’s nothing that even this group can do to change that.

Domestic abuse, child abuse, children’s homes and poverty figure largely in the women’s backgrounds. They grew up seeing a limited set of options for themselves. There is a lot of anger here, within the women and within the film itself, for all the focus on learning how to control and manage emotion. It’s hard not to be angry at a system that enables so much suffering and then punishes those left vulnerable as a result. The women are not making excuses for their crimes, but their stories are a good argument for alternative ways of finding justice.

There is also humour. As you might imagine, these are not the sort of people to give therapists an easy time, and when they think that some of the techniques used are stupid, they say so. When they’re asked to stand up if they long for a world without cages, one immediately thinks of shark cages and is unsure that that’s a good idea. As the film goes on, they hold back less and laugh more. Still, at least one is wary about what the future might hold, aware that if she ever really gets to the point of feeling safe, that’s when she will have to start dealing with her buried trauma.

All the women are going through a process of change. As the prison decays, so do the structures that have constrained their lives. Compton and Hudson capture this gracefully, without belabouring the point. Paint flakes off railings. Rust sets in. Ivy smothers the windows. When they finally emerge into the pale daylight, there is something different about the way they move.

Reviewed on: 19 Jun 2025