The St Giles's Roundhouse was a small roundhouse or

prison A prison, also known as a jail, gaol, penitentiary, detention center, correction center, correctional facility, or remand center, is a facility where Prisoner, people are Imprisonment, imprisoned under the authority of the State (polity), state ...

, mainly used to temporarily hold suspected criminals. It was located in the

St Giles Saint Giles (, , , , ; 650 - 710), also known as Giles the Hermit, was a hermit or monk active in the lower Rhône most likely in the 7th century. Revered as a saint, his cult became widely diffused but his hagiography is mostly legendary. A ...

area of present-day central

London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...

, between

Charing Cross Road Charing Cross Road is a street in central London running immediately north of St Martin-in-the-Fields to St Giles Circus (the intersection with Oxford Street), which then merges into Tottenham Court Road. It leads from the north in the direc ...

and

Holborn Holborn ( or ), an area in central London, covers the south-eastern part of the London Borough of Camden and a part (St Andrew Holborn (parish), St Andrew Holborn Below the Bars) of the Wards of the City of London, Ward of Farringdon Without i ...

, which – during the 17th and 18th centuries – was a '

rookery A rookery is a colony of breeding rooks, and more broadly a colony of several types of breeding animals, generally gregarious birds. Coming from the nesting habits of rooks, the term is used for corvids and the breeding grounds of colony-fo ...

' notorious for its thieves and other criminals. The Roundhouse was notable for being one of the prisons from which notorious thief

Jack Sheppard John Sheppard (4 March 1702 – 16 November 1724), nicknamed "Honest Jack", was a notorious English thief and prison escapee of early 18th-century London. Born into a poor family, he was apprenticed as a carpenter, but began committing thef ...

escaped, in 1724. The building was converted into

almshouse An almshouse (also known as a bede-house, poorhouse, or hospital) is charitable housing provided to people in a particular community, especially during the Middle Ages. They were often built for the poor of a locality, for those who had held ce ...

s in around 1780.Thornbury, Old and New London
/ref>

References

Defunct prisons in London Former buildings and structures in the London Borough of Camden Demolished prisons {{UK-prison-stub