The first act was to decide upon the plan for the new prison buildings. It was thrown open to competition by public advertisement and a reward was offered for the three best tenders. Mr. Hardwicke was eventually appointed architect and he estimated that £259,725 would be required for the work with a further sum of £42,690 for the foundations. Accommodation was to be provided at this price for six hundred prisoners, male and female, in equal proportions; and the whole building was intended solely for the confinement of offenders in the counties of London and Middlesex. By subsequent decisions, arrived at after the work was first undertaken, the size of Millbank grew to greater proportions, till it was ultimately made capable of containing, as one great national penitentiary, all the transportable convicts who were not sent abroad or confined in the hulks. Of course its cost increased _pari passu_ with its size. By the time the prison was finally completed, the total expenditure had risen as high as £458,000. And over and above this enormous sum, the outlay of many additional thousands was needed within a few years, for the repairs or restoration of unsatisfactory work. The Penitentiary, as it was commonly called, looked on London maps like a six-pointed star-fort, as if built against catapults and old-fashioned engines of war. The central point was the chapel, a circular building which, with the space around it, covered rather more than half an acre of ground. A narrow building, three stories high, and forming a hexagon, surrounded the chapel, with which it was connected at three points by covered passages. This chapel and its annular belt, the hexagon, form the keystone of the whole system. It was the centre of the circle, from which the several bastions of the star-fort radiated. Each of these salients was in shape a pentagon, and there were six of them, one opposite each side of the hexagon. They were built three stories high, on four sides of the pentagon, having a small tower at each external angle; while on the fifth side a wall about nine feet high ran parallel to the adjacent hexagon. In these pentagons were the prisoners’ cells, while the inner space in each, in area about two-thirds of an acre, contained the airing yards, grouped round a tall, central watch-tower. The ends of the pentagons joined the hexagon at certain points called junctions. The whole space covered by these buildings has been estimated at about seven acres; and something more than that amount was included between them and the boundary wall, which took the shape of an octagon, and beyond it was a moat.