HM Prison Weare
ship built in 2010
HMP Weare was an Adult Male/Category C prison ship berthed in Portland Harbour in Dorset, England. It was the latest in a lengthy history of British prison ships, which included HMS Maidstone, used as a prison during Operation Demetrius in the 1970s, HMS Argenta, in use as a prison in the 1920s, and a long list of British prison hulks dating from the late 18th century to the mid-19th century.
History
The ship was built in 1979 by Götaverken Finnboda of Stockholm, Sweden, as a floating accommodation barge for the offshore oil and gas industry. It was one of several such vessels owned by the Swedish company Consafe Offshore AB, under the name Safe Esperia. The vessel was acquired by the British Bibby Line in 1982, renamed Bibby Resolution, and chartered to the Ministry of Defence to provide troop accommodation in the Falkland Islands.
The Bibby Resolution, and her sister ship Bibby Venture, were bought by the New York City Department of Correction in 1988 to serve as prison ships. Bibby Resolution, as Maritime Facility II (MTF2), was docked in the East River at Montgomery Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and held up to 380 inmates. It was finally closed in 1992. In 1994 both ships were sold.
The UK established HMP Weare in 1997 as a temporary measure to ease prison overcrowding, and after a formal planning application was agreed the Bibby Resolution, now HMP Weare, was brought from New York.
“HM Prison Weare” enters the record as ship built in 2010. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Prison, Weare and ship can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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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 Jun 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4993879. Authority coordinates are 50.569, -2.435. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1979, 1982, 1988 and 1992.
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This entry incorporates text from “HM Prison Weare” 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.