HM Prison Drake Hall
women's prison in Staffordshire, England
HMP Prison Drake Hall is a women's closed prison, located near the town of Eccleshall in Staffordshire, England. The prison is operated by His Majesty's Prison Service.
History
Formerly used during World War II by female munitions workers as a residence, then as a Teacher Training College. From January 1957 until August 1957, Drake Hall was used as temporary housing for hundreds of refugees from Egypt, who were expelled by Nasser following the shambles of the Suez Crisis of October 1956. The first inflow of refugees was on 7 January 1957. Most of the first occupiers were from Alexandria. The building was repurposed in the 1960s as a male open prison. From 1974, Drake Hall has been used as a women's prison. In the mid-1990s, the prison was renovated. In 2002, it became a semi-open prison after a perimeter fence was constructed, but was re-designated a closed prison in March 2009.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “HM Prison Drake Hall” is women's prison in Staffordshire, England. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Prison, Drake and Hall, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5635166. VIAF identifies the subject as 123414796. The Library of Congress control number is nb2008007548. Authority coordinates are 52.879, -2.241. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1957, 1956, 1974 and 2002.
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This entry incorporates text from “HM Prison Drake Hall” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.