Tales of London

“The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the murky streets are muddiest, near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation: Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor, in his High Court of Chancery.

Never can there become fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds, this day, in the sight of heaven and earth.”

So writes Charles Dickens in the first chapter of his 1852 novel Bleak House, which employs the interminable legal bureaucracy of the Jarndyce v Jarndyce probate case as a central plot device. The Temple Bar - the gate where Fleet Street becomes the Stand, and the the City of London becomes the City of Westminster - has since been relocated as the southern entrance to Paternoster Square, and replaced with the largest and most fearsome of all the City’s boundary dragons. The “hoary sinner” of the High Court of Chancery, however, went in the opposite direction: in 1882 it packed up its bags at Lincoln’s Inn and moved a couple of hundred feet south, to the newly built Gothic palace of the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand – commonly known simply as ‘the Law Courts’.

From the fourteenth century, civil – i.e. non-criminal – courts would sit in Westminster Hall inside the Palace of Westminster. These included the Court of Chancery, the Court of King's Bench, the Court of Common Pleas, and the Court of Exchequer – each of which had overlapping and confusing jurisdictions. During legal holidays the courts would be scattered across various locations throughout London, which was of course terribly inconvenient, costly, and time consuming, not to mention that it was probably a nuisance to parliament. So in 1865 an Act of Parliament was passed to purchase land for the construction of a dedicated building in which to house all the superior civil courts.

Nearly £1.5m – over £100m today – was paid for a six-acre site on the north side of the Strand near the junction with Chancery Lane, just inside the City of Westminster. 450 homes were demolished with four-thousand residents evicted, although the location was ideal, sitting in the middle of the four Inns of Court: Gray’s Inn and Lincoln’s Inn to the north, and Middle and Inner Temples to the south. The choice of architect for the project was decided by a competition, with George Edmund Street emerging as victor. Street was predominantly an ecclesiastical architect, which is reflected in the Gothic Revival style of the final product (i.e. it has pointed windows, spires, and arches to resemble a medieval church).

Thirty-five million bricks were used to construct the building, which was then clad with Portland Stone; its one-thousand rooms and three-and-a-half miles of corridors puts it on a similar scale to the Houses of Parliament. Until relatively recently a man (dubbed ‘the Dawn Winder’ by a Radio 4 documentary) was employed to wind the thousand clocks in the building. On the pinnacles at the front of the building stand statues of Solomon, Jesus, and King Alfred, with a statue of Moses on a pinnacle at the rear: the four of them considered the pillars of English legal tradition. The circa £1m building and renovation cost (around £77m today) was paid for mainly through the estates of those who had died intestate – that is, without a will or legal heir.

Work on the building had started in 1874 and was supposed to be completed within six years, but labour troubles and financial difficulties delayed the project. A strike led to foreign workers - mostly from Germany - being shipped in to continue the construction, who had to be housed and fed on the building site due to the animosity towards them from the original workforce; building supplies were brought in through a secret underground tunnel. The stress of the project was supposedly what brought on a stroke that killed George Street in December 1881 at the age of fifty-seven; the building wasn't opened until a year later on 4th December 1882.

In 1875 the hodgepodge of the Court of Chancery, the Court of King's Bench, the Court of Common Pleas, the Court of Exchequer, the High Court of Admiralty, the Court of Probate, the Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes, and the London Court of Bankruptcy were all merged into one Supreme Court of Judicature, now known as the Senior Courts of England and Wales. This was divided into the Court of Appeal and the High Court, both of which still sit at the Royal Courts of Justice. The Court of Appeal hears appeals on both civil and criminal cases (hence the building contains cells, despite not being a criminal court); the High Court is divided into the King’s Bench, Chancery, and Family Divisions (the difference in jurisdictions between the first two are complicated to those of us without a legal background, but they’re essentially both concerned with civil financial claims).

Originally containing nineteen courts, the addition of the 1968 Queen’s Building and the 1990 Thomas More Building western annexes have increased this to sixty. Inside the main entrance can be found both a statue of George Street and the Permanent Exhibition of Legal and Judicial Costume, which the Lord Mayor of the City of London can glimpse at when he arrives here to be sworn in for his upcoming year. Guided tours of the Royal Courts of Justice are available to book, where you’ll be shown Room 666: ironically it's considered to be the coldest room in the building, and despite many attempts to scrub the numbering from the stonework above the doorway, the 666 remains visible…

For more stories about the fascinating history of London, have a look at my other articles, or scroll down and fill in the form below to subscribe to weekly updates!