Holloway opened in 1852 as a mixed prison and became, by the twentieth century, Britain's largest women's jail, and this film traces its history through the inmates who passed behind its walls. Edwardian-era baby-killers held under the era's harsh infanticide laws share the story with suffragettes who went on hunger strike and were force-fed by prison doctors after being jailed for window-smashing and arson campaigns. Diana Mitford, interned during the Second World War over her fascist sympathies, gets her own chapter, as does Ruth Ellis, the last woman executed in Britain, hanged at Holloway in 1955 for shooting her lover. Archival photographs, prison records, and historian interviews build a chronology running from the mid-1800s to the prison's later decades, tracking how attitudes toward women's crime, punishment, and mental health shifted while the building itself stayed the same. The result is less a single case study than a record of nearly a century of British social history seen through one institution's cells and courtrooms.