Picture Piece: Great Malborough Street Magistrates' Court

Bathed in the rosy glow of the city’s failing light, the severed cells of London’s Great Marlborough Street Magistrates’ Courts stand jacked-up on RSJs. Visible from the alley of Ramillies Place, the site is being cleared for a hotel and a preservation order has been slapped on this residual fragment. Like the ‘lurking beauty’ of the ‘huge square cistern’ formed by the Victorian Manhattan buildings of Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener (1853), the disembodied block faces the blank walls of its new incarceration, a dumb witness to its own history.

Exposed to day – and already wilting in the process – these half-rooms embody half-lives. Home to offenders from Oscar Wilde to Johnny Rotten – brought here to answer for their subcultural crimes – the cells hide behind the maw of Oxford Street as if ashamed of their criminal ghosts. To the unwitting passerby straying down the alley for a little law-offending of their own, this penitential palimpsest might be a deconstructed set from Porridge (1974) or The Italian Job (1969), lacking only the masterminds of Fletcher or Noel Coward – or maybe one of Jean Genet’s masturbating prisoners in Un Chant d’amour (1950). But its institutional closedness has been violated, and its power fades even as we watch, as another little bit of the past is sucked up in London’s reinvention.