The site they chose for the new prison was Carliol Croft, a piece of open land in the east part of central Newcastle.

It was designed by John Dobson in the Fortress Gothic Revival Style, built in ashlar stone at a cost of £35,000 and was completed in February 1828.

[3] The design involved a tall entrance tower with a gateway, behind which there was an elliptical main prison building with six radiating wings in the style of a panopticon.

[6] Over-crowding increased in 1881, after Morpeth Gaol closed,[7] and, by 1890, the building was accommodating 300 prisoners, three times as many as it was designed for, in very cramped conditions.

[8] Notable prisoners included the suffragette, Lady Constance Bulwer-Lytton, who was tried and convicted of disorderly behaviour after she threw a stone at a ministerial car during a visit to Newcastle by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, in October 1909.