For thousands of Victorian prisoners, Reading gaol was a brutal and unforgiving penitentiary. For some, the hulking red-brick prison was the final place of execution.

For Oscar Wilde, who spent 18 months there from November 1895 after his conviction for gross indecency, it was a place of both horror and inspiration, the source of some of his greatest writing but the most appalling experience of his life and the ruination of his health: “Each narrow cell in which we dwell/Is a foul and dark latrine/ And the fetid breath of living Death/ Chokes up each grated screen.”

The castellated, grade II listed building was closed as a working prison in 2013 and put up for sale last year. That prompted an inspired campaign to turn