Inside abandoned Red Bank unit where Jon Venables was held

The Red Bank Secure Unit in Newton-le-Willows was a juvenile detention centre where youths accused of crimes including murder, rape and arson were locked up from 1965 up until the facility’s closure in 2015.

Jon Venables, who aged 10 brutally killed two-year-old James Bulger alongside accomplice Robert Thompson, was among the former inmates in the early 1990s.

Red Bank was also home to Mary Bell, who strangled two toddlers to death in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the 1960s.

For the past five years, the unit off Winwick Road has laid empty.

But urban explorers have now provided a peek inside the facility with a series of creepy but fascinating pictures.

They show doors that appear to be splattered with blood, a note reading ‘I’m dead’ and a message scrawled on the wall stating ‘guns don’t just kill people, they kill families’.

Another mural reads: “All I wanted for my birthday was my dad back, I got a bike.”

Items left abandoned inside include pool tables, table football, televisions, computers, motorbike helmets, remote-controlled cars, washing machines, dartboards, sofas, clothing and board games.

For more, browse the photo gallery above - pictures courtesy of Webb7 Photography