| Summary : HMP Blundeston is one of the key prisons in the architectural history of England's prisons. It is the first of twenty two so-called "New Wave" prisons and it marks a complete rejection of the Victorian notion of a prison. HMP Blundeston was built between February 1961 and July 1963, and on 11th July it was photographed by the Property Services Agency (PSA). Its foundation stone had been laid by the Right Honourable R.A. Butler on 12th May 1961. The plan of the prison consists of four four-storied T-shaped cell blocks with floored landings, arranged around a central common service block. The cell blocks have 6 feet 6 inch square cells with sanitary facilities available on each landing. The centre block consists of education rooms flanking a central corridor on the ground floor with a kitchen and four dining rooms on the first floor. These are at the four corners of the block and each serves its adjacent wing. A chapel and training facilities are on the top floor, separated by ventilation ducts from the kitchen below. The hospital is an one-storey building to the west of the main complex. Two small wings were added in 1975 and a new kitchen and dining hall are opening in the summer of 1996. Blundeston established the pattern for the 1960s though it was not slavishly copied. In 1964 W. T. Jackson, Director of Works, undertook an enquiry into the planning, construction and cost of Blundeston, making a number of recommendations and suggestions. By the late 1980s the problems with the 1960s wing type had been recognised. It was expensive to staff, it made staff and inmates feel vulnerable in the spurs, and it lacked air and light in the corridors. Architects of the 1980s returned to a number of the main features of the supposedly archaic wings of HMP Everthorpe and its Victorian predecessors, arranging larger cells with integral sanitation around open galleries. By the 1990s these ideas had been integrated into a series of six standard Directorate of Works designs. |