THE custody area at Alton Police Station has reopened after a £70,000 revamp. The modernised facility, which took more than 12 weeks to complete, opened last Wednesday. The scheme means that for the first time staff and prisoners will enter the station through separate doors. Until now there has been a single rear- entrance door. This has now been demolished and replaced with two separate doors, one to the station and another to the custody area. The work also involved a prisoner "holding" area being built to keep prisoners until they have been allocated a cell by officers. The custody area has been closed while the project was undertaken, meaning that prisoners that would have been kept in one of its seven cells were taken to other stations across the county. Prisoners from the Alton area were taken to Winchester or Basingstoke, the Whitehill area to Aldershot and the Petersfield area to Waterlooville. The custody area will be closed again in the coming weeks to allow work to the cell floors to be completed. This is expected to take up to a fortnight.