This is the Police Station at Green Bat, later superseded by the police station we focused on the other day.

This imposing stone building was constructed in 1856 and somehow fit the police station and the town's court room. It did however used to stretch well back a good couple hundred metres, with separate buildings featuring cells and a work room. These buildings at the back were previously part of a prison here, holding a good couple hundred prisoners a year until the opening of Dobson’s Morpeth Gaol.

It was conveniently placed between the market and the workhouse. “Vagrants” and “tramps” make up the predominant reports for folk who got banged up here, sometimes drunk or in fits of anger with one man hitting someone else with the blunt end of an axe at the workhouse in 1886. There’s also quite a few burglaries on vicarage’s and farmhouses, I guess because rural crime was very easy to get away with.

Assailants and alleged perpetrators would be interviewed in this front building on the first floor, and if charged would be taken in the cells which through a door in the ground floor hallway. From there, there was a modest yard which still exists with further cells directly adjoining. Longer term criminals would be shipped off to Morpeth and later Newcastle. The town plan of the 1860s provide a revealing insight. This was also known as one of the most expensive prisons at the time, in part because barely anyone ended up being interned here.

It did remain the town police station into the 20th century, until it was superseded by the 1930s complex on Prudhoe Street. In later years, this became the district council treasury building and is now the Alnwick youth hostel with the buildings adjacent now forming part of it.