Reading continued as the County Gaol for the next 70 years. The new gaol, with cells for 250 men and women and a debtors’ ward, was ready for occupation in July 1844, by which time the need for additional cells, a separate laundry block and the rebuilding of the old perimeter wall had driven the final cost up from an initial estimate of £24,000 to an eventual total of more than £40,000. The building contract was initially given to John Jay of London, but his company went bankrupt three months after construction began in August 1842, and the work was completed by Messrs George and William Baker. This type would become ubiquitous during the course of the C19, with some twenty radial-plan prisons built in England during the period 1839-77. Its plan comprised a central hub and a series of radiating galleried wings containing individual cells, which was designed to implement the ‘separate system’ of solitary confinement and regular surveillance, introduced in Britain under the 1839 Prisons Act and pioneered ten years earlier at the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, USA. The winning design by George Gilbert Scott and William Bonython Moffatt was based on the then recently-completed New Model Prison at Pentonville in London. By the 1840s this had become overcrowded and dilapidated, and in 1842 a design competition was held for a new prison, which was to house 200 criminals and 20 debtors, with space for 100 additional cells and a court house. The original County Gaol was in Castle Street, but moved to a new building on the present site in 1786. Reading Gaol stands adjacent to the town centre, on a plot of riverside land once occupied by the cloister and burial ground of Reading Abbey. * Historic interest: strongly associated with the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde, who spent eighteen months of his two-year sentence there and later immortalised the institution in 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol'. * Planning interest: a pioneering English example of a radial-plan prison built for the newly-introduced 'separate system' of constant surveillance and solitary confinement * Architectural interest: an impressive, fortress-like design that represents an early work by one of England's foremost C19 architects The main building at Reading Gaol, of 1842-4 by George Gilbert Scott and William Boynthon Moffatt, is listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons:

Certain buildings and parts of the buildings are excluded from the Listing, as is made clear in the List entry. County gaol, 1842-4 by George Gilbert Scott and William Boynthon Moffatt, altered c.1970.

The reading gaol