HM Prison Berwyn is one of the UK’s newest, and one of the largest prisons in Europe, with a capacity of up to 2100 prisoners. Based in the Wrexham County Borough, Berwyn is a Category C adult male prison that was constructed by Lend Lease and officially opened in March 2017.
While working on behalf of the Prison Service constructing the prison, Lend Lease were hunting for a suitable secure storage system to maximise two areas of the project. With a large capacity there was expected to be a corresponding number of records, and inmate property stored.
Despite there being large areas allocated, the prison was going to be required to store three times the typical volume of material found in a regularly sized prison. The property store was looking for secure storage to accommodate 2100 prisoner property boxes together with solutions for the records store, which was to accommodate 2500 secure records and 2500 non secure records.
It was decided that a high density secure storage system would be required to ensure, not just initial capacity but the ongoing capacity if needs were to be met. To this aim, the Lend Lease team reached out to the market for support.
The Rackline teams submitted a plan for a mobile shelving system utilising Prospan and Profile shelving mounted onto Multitrak mobile bases.
The bays were custom designed and manufactured at 1450mm wide to accommodate 4 of the chosen property boxes in the width. The capacity was identified at 2380 prisoner property boxes which exceeded the requirements. Additionally with the records area the target of storing 2500 secure records was achieved together with 2500 none secure records. The solutions selected only utilised 75% of the area which will leave a further 25% for future expansion.
As per the brief, secure options were also added to the Profile shelving in the form of roller shutter doors and a locks.
Rackline’s high-density Mobile Racking and Shelving solutions provide not only the initial capacity required, but with their compact nature future proof the prison by leaving a further 25% expansion space.
Alun Johnson, Head of House commented, “The advantages of the Rackline storage system are that it maximises the storage potential of the area. Without this type of racking we would not be able to store the volume of records or property boxes in the areas identified this purpose.”
To find out more about Rackline’s collection of mobile and static shelving, or to discover the vast range of sectors we support, get in touch.
