The Prisons Memory Archive
Entrance of the Hospital of Maze and Long Kesh Prison 2007 (c) Prisons Memory Archive
The Prisons Memory Archive (PMA) contains over 150 filmed walk-and-talk recordings with those who had a connection with the Maze and Long Kesh Prison and Armagh Gaol during the conflict colloquially known as ‘the Troubles’. Recordings at the Maze and Long Kesh were made at the empty prison site in 2007, several years after its closure under the Good Friday Agreement and before the subsequent redevelopment of the site. Bringing participants back to the prison site gave the extant architecture an active role in stimulating and structuring the memories that form the basis of the collection.
Gate into the Hospital of Maze and Long Kesh Prison 2007 (c) Prisons Memory Archive
The result is an inclusive and multi-narrative collection. All of the PMA participants – including former prisoners and prison officers as well as educators, journalists and visitors – encountered the same architecture. Participants were free to explore the site as they wished, from the WWII-era compounds to the infamous complex of ‘H-Blocks’ first opened in 1976. Yet each person experienced different emotions and recollected very different stories, from the mundane details of everyday prison life to potent memories of traumatic and contested events. The collection thus draws together parallel narratives of the conflict and allows participants themselves to reinvest empty and abandoned buildings with layers of meaning and memory through their direct interaction with the architecture.
Hospital Corridor, Maze and Long Kesh Prison 2007 (c) Prisons Memory Archive
The prison hospital, where ten hunger strikers died during 1981, is for many of the participants one of the most emotive locations in the Maze and Long Kesh site. For one participant – a prison chaplain during this period - the space itself was a physical embodiment or ‘vessel’ of the conflict in Northern Ireland: “The tension and the conflict was just funnelled into these… what appear now to be such small and harmless spaces. But they were full of tension at that time.” In contrast, a chaplain who worked in the prison over a later period invests the hospital with a much different meaning: “It was a place where the division between loyalist and republican was left at the gate […] it was a place of reconciliation.” Taken together, these extracts comment on how spaces can be intrinsically connected with the activities and emotions contained within them, and how spaces can change – sometimes radically - in meaning over time. They also exemplify the range of spatial narratives held within the PMA.
View friom a watch tower of the H-Blocks of Maze and Long Kesh Prison 2007 (c) Prisons Memory Archive
The PMA is a partnership project between Queen's University Belfast and the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, and is supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. Find out more at: www.prisonsmemoryarchive.com
