Temporary Prison Kitchen Features Explained

As PKL’s prison kitchen specialist, I appreciate the specific challenges involved in prison hires and have supplied a variety of temporary kitchen facilities to prisons, feeding from 300 to 1200 inmates per day. With a large number of prison kitchen hires undertaken during my time at PKL, I have helped to develop a number of kitchen features which are ideally suited to secure environments.

In this blog post I’ll outline a few of these key features available in our secure establishment kitchens, in order to tackle some of the questions I’m commonly asked about PKL’s prison facilities.

Safety and Security
Safety and security are important in any kitchen but even more so in a secure establishment.

The design of our kitchens can include both general and fire alarms, and cooking canopies are fitted with automatic fire suppression as standard.

The external doors to our facilities are prison specification and ready to receive prison category locks. Our kitchens can also have separate entrances for inmates and officers with hold and search areas if required.

Whenever possible, to maintain security during delivery, we use cranes either side of the prison wall to lift units over and then position them in place inside the grounds. This avoids a constant flow of vehicles through the gate lock and reduces security risks.

Visibility
Our open plan kitchen designs allow supervisory staff maximum visibility, and we use half height
walls where possible. Where this is not practical, we can fit polycarbonate vision panels instead.

To maintain line of sight, all our Central Island Canopies have through and through visibility, and the back-to-back design allows one officer to supervise multiple canopy runs.

Layout
The wide central corridor in our kitchens allows for the easy flow of staff and goods, and this benefit extends into the main production and preparation areas thanks to the open plan construction. This makes best use of available space and provides the feel and flexibility of a permanent building.

The prime cooking equipment is located under Central Island Canopies which give the maximum extraction length without using large amounts of wall space and improve the layout and visibility.

Goods inward areas feature a reinforced floor to cope with the cage movement, plus over-door heating and a porch to protect the kitchen from bad weather while goods are being delivered.

Welfare
Open plan kitchens using Central Island Canopies feature thermostatically controlled tempered air which maintains the kitchen temperature – this is an essential feature for any open plan kitchen that is going to be onsite over the winter months.

Roof mounted plant rooms are placed above our Central Island Canopies and house the extraction fans and the boiler for the tempered air. The use of plant rooms ensures that there are no roof leaks where the extraction penetrates the ceiling, and significantly reduces noise both inside the kitchen and externally. It also improves security by preventing outdoor access via the canopy ducting.

Where the kitchen is going to be located near a housing block, optional sound attenuators can be fitted to the coldrooms to minimise night time noise.


I hope you’ve found this post useful in answering some of the questions you may have had about our prison kitchen facilities. Our kitchens of course offer a number of other features as standard, making them fully compliant with safety and hygiene regulations.

We can provide a wide variety of temporary kitchen facilities depending on your requirements, such as production kitchens, preparation kitchens, coldrooms and dishwashing facilities, so please get in touch for a chat if you’d like to find out more about our prison kitchen options.

We also offer free, bespoke kitchen contingency plans to provide your prison with a tailored kitchen design which we could have on site within hours of a kitchen emergency.

PKL Contingency Week – Part 2

Public sector institutions such as schools, hospitals and prisons are often heavily reliant on their catering facilities, with many people depending on them. It can therefore be disastrous when a loss of catering capability occurs. By having a kitchen contingency plan in place, you can ensure that you have a temporary replacement facility on site within a matter of hours, in the case of an emergency occurring.

Many public sector sites have already got personalised kitchen contingency plans in place with us, but if you haven’t got one yet don’t worry! We can provide you with a bespoke kitchen contingency plan completely free of charge – just fill out this quick online form to tell us about your current catering operation, and we’ll send you a personalised contingency plan based on this information.

Case Study: School Fire
When a large fire destroyed a school, the entire school was reopened in temporary buildings while the damaged buildings were rebuilt. PKL provided the school kitchen facility as part of this temporary structure, enabling the continuation of school meal provision to pupils and staff.

Case Study: Prison Kitchen Loss
When a large prison experienced a problem with the gas supply to its kitchen, PKL supplied an all-electric temporary kitchen facility to maintain catering provision in the meantime. For prisons, kitchen contingency planning is especially important, as inmates often cannot leave site to go elsewhere for food, so are entirely reliant on the prison kitchen to receive their meals.

Case Study: School Arson
Several years ago, PKL supplied an emergency kitchen to a school that had suffered an arson attack during the summer holidays, completely destroying existing facilities on site. The temporary kitchen complex we provided was a large facility which was successfully installed ready for the start of term. It stayed on site for 18 months while the school kitchen was rebuilt, and offered all the capabilities of the original school kitchen. To read more on this case study, click here.

Our temporary facilities are also ideal for use during planned kitchen closures, to keep your catering operation running smoothly during refurbishments or other works. If you have any upcoming refurbishments or other kitchen closures planned, please don’t hesitate to get in touch, and I can advise you on suitable temporary facilities to provide cover for this period.

Permanent Modular Prison Kitchen Building

PKL Group constructed a prison kitchen for a temporary custodial facility built alongside existing prison buildings.

Working to a tight deadline, PKL supplied a 560m2 System Kitchen to site, 13 weeks after receiving the order from the main contractor. The kitchen was delivered fully equipped and was handed over to the client eight weeks later.

The System Kitchen was built using off-site construction techniques, which greatly reduced the overall lead-time of the project. The kitchen, which contains a number of unique features, is designed to blend in with its surroundings and is fully relocatable so that it can easily be moved to another part of the site if needed.

PKL has over 20 years’ experience of designing modular buildings and, using the very latest off-site construction techniques, has delivered many System Kitchen projects throughout the UK.

A System Kitchen can adhere to the latest in prison design specifications, while being tailor-made for the facility in question. It can be adapted according to the equipment required, the amount of people catered for, staffing levels and the number of meals that will be served each day.

Specifying a System Kitchen can drastically reduce the overall timescale of a project, as design and off-site building takes place at the same time as work on the construction site. The kitchen arrives on-site fully equipped, negating any fit-out time, and it is ready for connection to the required utilities.

PKL provides a complete ‘turnkey’ solution covering design, planning, construction, M&E, equipment, installation, commissioning and service.