The Ministry of Love building has no windows and is surrounded by barbed wire entanglements, steel doors, hidden machine gun nests, and guards armed with "jointed truncheons". Inside, the bright lights are never turned off (it is enigmatically referred to as "the place where there is no darkness"). Winston was placed in a high-ceilinged windowless cell with walls of glittering white porcelain. Concealed lamps flooded it with cold light, and there was a low, steady humming sound which he supposed had something to do with the air supply. A bench, or shelf, just wide enough to sit on ran round the wall, broken only by the door and, at the end opposite the door, a lavatory pan with no wooden seat. There were four telescreens, one in each wall.

Later he was moved to another room. There Winston was strapped into a chair surrounded by dials and under dazzling lights. Then he found himself staring up from a plank bed. There was a period of blackness and then the cell, or room, in which he now was had gradually materialized round him. He was almost flat on his back, and unable to move. His body was held down at every essential point. Even the back of his head was gripped in some manner. He was heavily interrogated here.

After that Winston was finally moved to "Room 101". It was bigger than most of the cells he had been in. There were two small tables straight in front of him, each covered with green baize. One was only a meter or two from him, the other was further away, near the door. He was strapped upright in a chair, so tightly that he could move nothing, not even his head. A sort of pad gripped his head from behind, forcing him to look straight in front of him. A guard brought in a metal cage. It was an oblong wire cage with a handle on top for carrying it by. Fixed to the front of it was something that looked like a fencing mask, with the concave side outwards. Although it was three or four meters away from him, he could see that the cage was divided lengthways into two compartments, and that there was some kind of creature in each. They were rats.