This website allows you to search millions of records from around fifty datasets, relating to the lives of 90,000 convicts from the Old Bailey. Use our site to search individual convict life archives, explore and visualise data, and learn more about crime and criminal justice in the past.

In December 2019 this website was updated with the addition of two datasets on convict tattoos and a new search feature allowing you to search by convict occupations. A substantial number of additional punishment outcomes have been linked to trials. We have made a number of corrections to convict genders and ages, and new visualisations have been added to the visualisation gallery.

58,002 convicts in this database had tattoos. You can now search for specific tattoos and for specific types of tattoos on specific parts of the body. You can also create visualisations of tattoo design by body location, tattoo subjects according to religion, tattoo designs by place of birth and tattoo designs by occupation.

[Anonymous], Prison Hulks on the River Thames, Woolwich (c. 1856). © Greenwich Local History Library.