I had a rare interior shoot last week with a visit to Ripon to photograph the Courthouse Museum and Prison & Police Museum for my postcard range.

The Courthouse is quite small with just three rooms – a Jury Room, a Retiring Room and the Courtroom but there are plenty of interesting exhibits so with the plan to produce a four image card with two external shots I was actually spoiled for choice for images to fill the two internal shots on the card!

Over at the Prison & Police Museum there was a lot more choice with two floors of exhibits in the cells of a former prison, incuding a variety of North Yorkshire Police and West Riding Constabulary artefacts, mugshot and fingerprinting displays.

The prison exhibits included a plain empty cell (rather sobering), a Victorian cell and the local story of the Sinkler Brothers who were sentenced to be hanged but this was later commuted to transportation.

The Victorian Cell contains a crank – used for hard labour.  There’s one in the cell next door (next to the treadmills) which you can try – one turn was easy enough but I’m not sure I fancy 10,000 a day – and if you were caught slacking the warder could tighten the screw on the crank to make turning it harder.  Grim stuff!

Both museums were very interesting – as is the Workhouse Museum which I’d photographed inside a while ago – so I must go back when I’m not on a photo shoot at some point to do them justice (no pun intended!).

I’ve just got the new postcard design proofs back from the printer and they’ll be added to my postcard range soon – so look out for them at Ripon Museums in due course!