Gaming tokens

Assumed Pasts

I was told these objects were probably made on a prison hulk – a decommissioned warship used to incarcerate people. Prison hulks were semi-permanently moored along the Thames between 1776 and 1856. There were at least 69 British prison hulks active during this period,4 including at Deptford, Woolwich, Chatham, Portsmouth and in British colonial outposts such as Bermuda, Gibraltar and Australia.

It is not inconceivable that these lead tokens came from prison hulks, but it’s just as likely they fell from the land. This collection of objects and the prison hulks are constructed companions. Told together in one story because of the proximity to both river and land, the liminal space of the foreshore.5 And honestly, I don’t feel the need to get to the bottom of this unknown. They are all stories.

In 1776, the Criminal Law Act authorised the use of decommissioned ships as prison hulks as ‘temporary’ sites to hold incarcerated people before they were transported to Australia. An ‘overcrowding solution’. This pipeline formed because the previous British colonial exports of human life to America was hindered by the Revolutionary War. It was a reconfiguring of violence.

The Thames was a lively space bustling with ships, docks, and people moving through the water. Would a few stationary ships decommissioned and ‘repurposed’ as prison hulks stand out? Would their inhabitants? Step out your door and did an intrusive shadow loom? Was the state trying to hide them too? Did it feel like when the cruise ships come into dock now and block the light usually afforded by the emptiness of the river?

The prison hulks sat on the silty bed of the Thames. Nearby, the Crowleys made manacles (to restrain prisoners) in their factory at Enderby’s Wharf. The Warren in Woolwich was a site of forced labour and used for unmarked burials of people imprisoned on the hulks.6 From here, people were forcibly transported out of the river mouth on sea-worthy convict ships to penal colonies in Australia. The 1776 Act authorised the use of prison hulks for two years, and yet it persisted for 80 and spread far beyond the Thames. At the beginning of 1845, 3,169 people were incarcerated on board prison hulks (greater than the number of people, 2,937, incarcerated on land).7

Handmade tokens called ‘leaden hearts’ can tell us something of the individuals behind these numbers. Some faced transportation for as little as stealing a wheel of cheese (Lewis Lyons in 1831).8 Some faced lifetime transportation for nonviolent offenses such as coining (Elizabeth Martin in 1831).9 Others were offered a ‘conditional pardon’ if they served in the army or navy, which came with similarly poor chances of survival.10

Prison hulks, like those built on land, were grounded in the ‘construction of disposable people’.11 The conditions on the hulks were extremely poor; for example, between 1776 and 1778, nearly one in four people incarcerated on the hulk Justitia died.12 Many deaths were caused by infectious diseases, neglect and inadequate medical care. This persists in prisons today. For example, a 2009 inquest into Paul Clavert’s death in Pentonville ruled that his death was ‘contributed by neglect’.13

Potential Futures

There is current and ongoing state violence throughout the prison-industrial complex (from prisons and detention centres to psychiatric hospitals and the police). This includes the privatisation of the prison industrial complex; the broadening definitions of criminality (e.g. criminalising of peaceful protestors); and carceral spaces becoming more fragmented and less detectable (e.g. detention in healthcare spaces).14

From 2023 to 2025 the Bibby Stockholm incarcerated asylum seekers on a barge in Portland, Dorset. Likewise, these vast networks of detention and removal centres are typically located near transport hubs, does this feel familiar?15 The modern police force was invented around 200 years ago and slowly spread out from London during the 1800s.

‘Just as prisons and police are made to appear like a natural function of society, as if they had always been there, the contemporary prison’s deployment within the landscape aims to erase the specific violence of the expansions of mass incarceration within the city.’16

In their work on ‘carceral geographies’, Hussein Mitha writes about the state’s idea of turning HMP Barlinnie in Glasgow into a museum; a ‘repurposing would exacerbate a false consciousness in relation to the state’s prison industrial complex… turned into ‘heritage’, which it could simultaneously claim was ‘of the past’, thereby erasing the expanded carceral regime of the present…’17 So, we must remember, incarceration is not only historic violence. Its mechanisms and institutions are old, but not that old. They are not inevitable. They can be unravelled.