Oxford – the city of dreaming spires, Britain’s academic heart, and now home to the world’s most luxurious jail.

Once a miserable home to the city’s ne’er-do-wells, Oxford Prison has reinvented itself as a spectacular hotel.

The building was recently named as one of Britain’s 10 best secrets.

Malmaison has taken it and transformed it into a building where you enter through the original heavy metal studded doors before enjoying a posh cocktail in the imposing visiting room and retiring to bed in a room converted from three cells knocked into one.

The prison, which closed for the final time in the 1990s, also echoes to the memory of famous film and television scenes.

It appeared in the Italian Job, was a fixture in Inspector Morse and has been a set to such famous names as Gerard Depardieu, Glenn Close, Robert Redford and Brad Pitt.

The heart of the prison, with its wrought ironwork stairs and three inch thick steel doors, has hardly been altered – apart, of course, that today’s guests enjoy the luxury of king size beds, satellite TV and a well-stocked mini-bar.

Venture into C-wing, the old Governor house, where you get mezzanine rooms with four-poster beds and their own mini cinema thrown in.

Architects who oversaw the transformation of the prison to a hotel truly deserve an award, for while enjoying the perks of staying in an upmarket hotel, visitors also get a feel for the imposing claustrophobia that inmates would have endured in years gone by.

The doors to each room slam with a resonance that echoes through in a prison atrium that is largely as it was. Brickwork to each suite has been delicately touched up to keep the ‘ambience’ of a cell and the visitors room, once the place where prisoners met their loved-ones, is truly spectacular in wall-to-ceiling black.

Dinner and breakfast is served in the prison boiler room, an intimate part of the prison where a number of private rooms have been created for parties.

It is the stuff American tourists can’t get enough of, especially as the prison sits next door to Oxford Castle and is a two minute walk from the city’s impressive shops, indoor market, colleges and river.

Incarceration has frankly never been so much fun – sentence yourself to a weekend in this jail for good behaviour and you won’t mind if they throw away the key.

Oxford Facts:

• Malmaison Hotel is in the centre of Oxford, a short walk from the railway station. Rooms are available from £99, although £75 deals including evening meal are available on Sunday nights. More details at www.malmaison-oxford.com or call 01865 268 400.
• Oxford University: a collection of independently founded colleges, each with its own history and administration.
• Ashmolean Museum: Britain’s first official museum. Free entry
• Oxford’s rivers: Punting remains a popular activity – but prepare to queue in the summer.
• Covered Market: next to the city’s modern shopping centre.