HM Prison Berwyn
category-C adult-male prison in Wrexham, Wales
HM Prison Berwyn (Welsh: Carchar Berwyn EF; Welsh: ['bɛrwɪn]) is a £250 million Category C adult male prison in Wrexham County Borough, Wales. It is the largest prison in the UK, opened in 2017, and is operated by His Majesty's Prison Service.
Name
The prison's name was announced by then-Governor Russ Trent on 17 February 2016. The name Berwyn comes from the elements of Middle Welsh barr ('summit, peak') and gwyn ('white'). A spokesperson for the National Offender Management Service (NOMS) said that the prison had been named after the Welsh mountain range. The original shortlist of six names was: Bridgeway, Marcher, Cerrig Tân, Dee Vale, Whittlesham and Y Berwyn. These names were suggested by local schools, communities and historical societies.
Structure
The prison is split into three houses, the first, Bala opening in February 2017 and the other two, Alwen and Ceiriog in the autumn. Each section can hold different communities including one for armed forces veterans.
Operation
It was designed to house 2,100 men and to be the cheapest to run Category C prison in the country, with a projected cost of £14,000 (equivalent to £17,900 in 2025) per inmate.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “HM Prison Berwyn” as category-C adult-male prison in Wrexham, Wales. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as category-C adult-male prison in Wrexham, Wales. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q19904221. The first chronological checks are 2017, 2016 and 2025.
Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “HM Prison Berwyn” 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.