HM Prison Peterhead
former prison in Scotland
HMP Peterhead was a prison in Peterhead in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, operating from 1888 to 2013. Since June 2016, the former grounds operate as the Peterhead Prison Museum.
History
Peterhead Convict Prison was built around 1888. It was designed to hold 208 prisoners and to be Scotland's only convict prison, i.e. for prisoners sentenced to 'hard labour'. Occupancy averaged at around 350 however, until peaking at 455 in 1911. Additional buildings were completed in 1909, 1960 and 1962, bringing capacity up to 362. According to the Scottish Prison Service, the prison could, in 2012, accommodate up to 142 prisoners.
It closed in 2013, to be replaced by the new HMP Grampian, the first prison in Scotland to jointly house youths, men and women. The first inmates transferred on to site on 2 March 2014 having been temporarily housed at other sites and connected to family with virtual visits by videolink.
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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 Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5635245. VIAF identifies the subject as 157542444. The Library of Congress control number is nr88005327. Authority coordinates are 57.490, -1.787. 3 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1888, 2013, 2016 and 1911.
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This entry incorporates text from “HM Prison Peterhead” 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.