Barlinnie Up Close

From laughter in the halls to shadows of the 1987 riot – we take a guided walk through the complex heart of Scotland's toughest prison

- by RACHEL McCONACHIE

YOU don't expect to laugh inside a prison, but at Barlinnie, Scotland's most infamous jail, wherever the staff are it echoes with jokes, nicknames and bursts of belly laughs.

"This place made me," says first line manager Vinnie Gunn, who survived the 1987 riot as a 21-year-old officer, barricaded overnight in a burning hall. "It either makes you or breaks you. For me, it confirmed I was staying."

That pride in the job was evident in every corner of Barlinnie during my visit. Amid the razor wire, high sandstone walls and the sheer institutional weight of over a century of incarceration, I found something I wasn’t expecting: warmth.

Gardens dot the walkways, planted and maintained by prisoners. The blooms soften the bleak edges of the facility's architecture – especially the imposing original halls, built in the 1880s, where austere stonework and barred windows whisper of a darker past.

Barlinnie’s age is felt everywhere. Cracked walls, narrow corridors, leaky ceilings and the clang of old keys in iron locks – this is a prison with deep history.

As we made our way along a wide concrete area behind one of the older halls, a voice rang out from above. A man leaned into the bars of his tiny window, shouting down to Vinnie.

He had a thick west coast accent, patchy teeth and a grin so broad it bordered on cartoonish – a jarring image against the grey stone and heavy metal fixtures of his world.

“Hey! Gonnae give me a job in the workshop?” he called out, then, spotting me with my notebook, he added, “Are you fae the paper?” I wanted to answer, ask his name, hear his story, but I knew instinctively I shouldn't. This wasn't a conversation I was part of, so I smiled faintly and walked on.