Millbank takes its name from the mill that belonged to Westminster Abbey and stood on the lonely and marshy riverside linking Westminster to Chelsea in the 1700s, It was demolished c1736 by Sir Robert Grosvenor, who built a house that stood until 1809.

London’s largest prison was then erected on this marshland site, at a cost of £500,000. When finished in 1821, Millbank Penitentiary was hailed as the greatest prison in Europe.

Its pioneering ‘panopticon’ design was devised by Jeremy Bentham, the philosopher and philanthropist, and later used for other English penal institutions. At its centre was the Governor’s House, which allowed prison guards to keep watch over 1,500 transportation prisoners housed in separate cells in the surrounding pentagonal blocks. There were three miles of cold, gloomy passages: the turnkeys invented a code of chalked directions to stop getting lost in the maze!

From above, it was like a vast six-petalled flower of dirty yellow brick, a multi-turreted fortress with bars at the windows. Surrounding it was a stagnant outer moat, enclosing over 16 acres of cold, damp squalor. And so, before long, prisoners became prone to terminal scurvy,

In David Copperfield published in 1849, Charles Dickens described the area as 'a melancholy waste … A sluggish ditch deposited its mud at the prison walls. Coarse grass and rank weeds straggled over all the marshy land.'

The Royal Army Medical College (RAMC) was designed in Imperial Baroque style by John Henry Townsend Woodd and Wilfred Ainslie, two Scottish architects who practised in partnership in London from 1887. This was their most prominent commission.

The adjoining Regimental Officers’ Mess and Commandant’s House, in French Renaissance style, was the work of the same firm. Construction on this Millbank complex started in 1904, and King Edward VII and Queen Alexander officially opened. the complex on 15th May 1907.

The statue of Sir James McGrigor, known as ‘the father of army medicine’ was first erected by public subscription in the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, and moved to the College grounds in 1907.

During the first world war, teaching was suspended and the College was used for the production of vaccines. It was here that the vaccine against typhoid was developed. Later, the buildings were used for research into protection against chemical warfare – early gas masks were developed here. Teaching resumed in 1919, together with research into insecticides, nutrition, and inoculation procedures.

During the second world war, courses in tropical medicine for over 3,000 medical officers continued. That was despite the college being seriously damaged in 1941 (the walls of the Tate Gallery opposite still bear the scars).

Although much of the original interior was plain, as befitted a medical teaching institution, the principal Mess Rooms on the first floor were – by any standards – very fine. The RAMC reputably had the finest Officers’ Mess in pre-war London.