Heritage groups oppose plan to modernise jail

A prison might seem an unlikely setting for an architectural squabble but a plan to demolish 19th-century jail blocks has provoked the ire of heritage groups.

The Scottish Prison Service had been hoping to end the practice of "slopping out" at Perth prison's C Hall where, unlike in other Scottish jails, inmates are still using buckets as lavatories.

But the jail is listed and Historic Scotland and the Architectural Heritage Society of Scotland are insisting that nothing comes of a £70m plan to demolish it and other penal buildings and replace them with a modern, purpose-built prison.

They say the squat stone block has a "considerable architectural and historical significance" and also oppose proposals to remove a section of the original prison wall and the former governor's house, which were built at the beginning of the 19th century.

Perth and Kinross council agreed with the conservationists and threw the proposal out. The Prison Service has launched an appeal.

C Hall, constructed between 1839 and 1842, stands on the site of the original prison, which was built by Robert Reid in the early 1800s to house 7,000 French prisoners from the Napoleonic War.

Clive Fairweather, a former chief inspector of Scottish prisons, condemned C Hall early last year as "one of the worst halls anywhere in the Scottish Prison Service".

Tom Fox, a Prison Service spokesman, said: "We have a facility where prisoners have no access to night sanitation. This prison was designed for the penal system of the 19th century. It does not meet the requirements of the 21st- century system."

The Prison Service has warned that unless it is able to modernise the existing buildings it might have to build a prison elsewhere.