ABSTRACT
This chapter and the next turn to look at two particular periods in the history of court architecture and design in an attempt to unravel what the state of architecture can tell us about the weight attached to the administration of justice in society at different times. In this chapter I focus on the revolutionary transformation of courthouse design from buildings located in castles, market halls and shire halls to the purpose-built and monumental designs of the long nineteenth century.1 The ambitions of those commissioning and designing courthouses of this period is such that this era can be best understood as marking the heyday of architectural ambition for courts in England. It is also during this period that modern templates for design began to emerge. Indeed many of the characteristics of contemporary courts can be traced to this period. In some ways the story I tell in this chapter is unexceptional. Many of the changes in the architectural style which occurred in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century can be explained by the development of specialised building types more generally. A burgeoning interest in style, a demand for greater standards of comfort, greater wealth and the emergence of new concepts of public and private spheres all led to a demand for new, grander and increasingly differentiated buildings. Despite this, I argue that there is also a more nuanced account of the development of the law court as a specialist building type which deserves to be told and has been largely neglected to date. It is a story about the inextricable link between the modern law court, the process of industrialisation and the emergence of a much-reformed legal system. In the chapter which follows I turn to compare the ambitions of the nineteenth century with thinking about court design today. The story of the new town halls, concert halls, reading rooms and libraries planned and often funded by industrialists in the nineteenth century has been charted extensively elsewhere. But despite the extensive literature on Victorian architecture very few writers have turned their attention to the role of the law court in expressing the new ideals of the market place and public sphere. When they are discussed, law courts tend to be included in lists of new specialist building types or as examples of Victorian ambition and civic pride. Graham (2004)
alone hints that it is during this period that the scale of provincial courts and the resources lavished, or even ‘squandered’ (p.267) upon them can not be understood by reference to general trends alone. In this chapter I explore this assertion in more depth and look at the association of ‘new money’ with the development of a particular model of the law court. I argue that the links between a reformed legal system which served the mercantile classes and the building programmes they championed served to aggrandise the role of law in modernity. It is in this context which we can best understand the ways in which the law court was transformed from a shire hall to a building which was particularly deserving of recognition and celebration in the new civic landscape. I argue that three particular social and political movements were to alter the spatial practices of law from the late eighteenth century onwards. At national level, an appetite for change, prompted in part by a new radical politics worked as a major driver of centralised legal reform and the undermining of a largely local legal system based on privilege. In turn, this was to lead to new hopes for law and a reformed legal system as an instrument of social change and bulwark of a rational society in which success was based on merit rather than privilege. Finally, I contend that it was the mobilisation of law fuelled by a new class of merchant princes keen to glorify their own achievements which provided the most pressing imperative in courthouse design over this period.
