Families' Reception Centre, HM Prison Saughton
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Purpose-built reception building for prison visitors featuring cafe and children's playroom
The reception at HM Prison Saugton allows the structural grid to provide more private waiting areas against a deeply modelled, timber-glazed wall. As well as flaring in plan, the café and waiting area’s roof opens up in a lazy yawn to the south, allowing light to penetrate deep into the interior.
The plan ultimately focuses on a children’s playroom, saturated in colour, and imaginatively detailed with lively fenestration and recessed soft play pit.
The served and the servant spaces also call out the inherent constructional strategy, with glulam roof members/steel composite columns to the former and load-bearing block domestic construction to the latter.
The first purpose-built reception building for prison visitors in Scotland was not a new concept for Gareth Hoskins Architects, which was already project architect for the Penoyre & Prasad’s Belmarsh Visitors’ Centre completed in 1996 at Belmarsh Prison, England.
Data
- Begun: Mar 1999
- Completed: Mar 2000
- Floor area: 468m2
- Sector: Civic
- Total cost: £800,872
- Tender date: Feb 1999
- Address: Stenhouse Road, Stenhouse, Edinburgh, EH11 3LN, United Kingdom
Professional Team 
- Architect: Gareth Hoskins Architects
- Project architects: Alex Flockhart, Gareth Hoskins, Jude Quarston
- Client: The Onward Trust, HM Prison Edinburgh
- Quantity surveyor: Davis Langdon & Everest
- Planning supervisor: James Gentles & Son
- Structural engineer: Arup
Suppliers
- Steel frame: Pavo Steel
- Glulam beams: Donaldson & McConnell Ltd
- Copper roofing: A&J Roofting
- Specialist joinery: Descant Joinery
- Electrical: Forth Electrical Services
- External works and ground works: Markon
- Play area equipment and exterior play surface: SMP Playgrounds
- Underfloor heating: Multibeton