History
Originally known as Grendon Hall, the building was constructed in 1872 as a family home. During the Second World War the site was initially used as a base for MI6, and was then a training centre for the Special Operations Executive. After the war, the site was converted by the Prison Service, and became the first Open Prison in the United Kingdom in 1953.
In April 2003, thieves broke into Spring Hill Prison, stealing £650 from a safe and taking valuable personal effects, including mobile phones, from inmates' lockers.
In December 2007, after a colony of sparrows had settled at the London Zoo's Gorilla exhibit, inmates constructed ten bird boxes for the zoo to encourage the birds to breed and stay in the area.
Read more about this topic: Spring Hill (HM Prison)
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“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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“The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.”
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