According to Colin Crosby, a Blue Badge guide based in Leicester,[2] tourists invariably ask if the prison is 'Leicester Castle', due to the embattled, medieval design of its frontage, and its unique appearance has also made it one of the city's most celebrated landmarks.

The journalist William Cobbett, who wrote about his journeys around England in the early 19th century, criticised the people of Leicester for being proud of their new prison, feeling that it would be more praiseworthy to have an absence of crime.

[5] The prison's distinctive, red brick perimeter walls are thought to be the highest in the country, with an estimated height of 30 feet.

He then chose to drop by his fingertips from a part of the wall which was located above the governor's garden, in the hope that the soft earth would help break his fall.

[7] In 2014, it was reported that prison officers had thwarted a similar plan for an escape over the wall by an inmate who was serving six years for robbery.

On 20 April 1829, a triple execution was carried out in front of the newly opened prison when Charles Forrester (21), John Hinton (25) and William Varnam (24) were hanged for horse stealing.

In reporting the incident, the Leicester Chronicle newspaper noted that after the executioner had pulled caps over the faces of the condemned men, "a short but painful suspense took place, owing to some difficulty in removing the bolt which causes the platform on which they stood, to fall".

On Saturday afternoon his body, attired as at the time of his execution, having been firmly fixed in the irons necessary to keep the limbs together, was carried to the place of its intended suspension."

Representations were in consequence made to the authorities, and on the following Tuesday morning instructions were received from the Home Office directing the removal of the gibbet."

Gibbeting was soon after abolished in England, in 1834[14] William Hubbard (23) was hanged on 1 April 1846, for the murder of his wife at Leicester, having cut her throat with a butcher's knife.

[17][18] Following the Capital Punishment Amendment Act 1868 public executions were abolished and all hangings thereafter were carried out inside the prison, behind closed doors.

Tugby had been drinking with the three men at the Stamford and Warrington public house in Coalville before they had followed him and kicked him to death at a nearby railway bridge.

Both men protested their innocence before the trapdoor fell, after which the gaol bell was tolled and a black flag was flown from the roof of the prison to signal to the public that justice had been served.

[26] William Henry Palmer (50), a painter from Manchester, was hanged on 19 July 1911 for the murder of 72 year old Ann Harris at Walcote, near Lutterworth.

[30] The last execution was that of Joseph Christopher Reynolds (31), convicted at Leicester Assizes for the murder of Janet Warner, and hanged by Albert Pierrepoint on November 17, 1953.

The newspaper reported that seven years earlier in 1993, Inquest, a charity which campaigns for the families of people who die in custody, had described HMP Leicester as the "suicide capital of the prison system".