On 14 July 2006 the magistrates’ court opposite the Royal Opera House on Bow Street tried its final cases before being closed and redeveloped as a hotel.
This brought to an end over 260 years of ‘law and order’ in Bow Street that encompassed the 18th century ‘Bow Street Runners’ (thought of as a precursor to Peel’s Metropolitan Police Force), a police station with ‘beats’ around Covent Garden and the court that saw appearances from Oscar Wilde, Dr Crippen, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, the Kray twins and many more.
There is now a small museum that incorporates some of the old police cells and which traces the history of crime and justice on the site. There are tales from ex-coppers and about old villains, and exhibits such as the cutlasses wielded by the ‘Runners’ as well as slightly more modern police truncheons (including the small WPC’s version from the 1960s) and handcuffs (“can definitely be ‘flicked’ on a prisoner’s wrist”).
One can sit in the old cells with their thin plastic mattresses and imagine preparing oneself to go up before the beak in the morning, or ‘lounge’ on a bench in the ‘tank”, the cell that might hold 20 or more of the night’s drunks. They even have the old dock from the court that was graced by the prisoners listed above.
I’d have liked a few more objects to handle, and a bit more interactivity – the museum is longer on reading and watching than it is on exhibits – but this is a fine place for anyone interested in the history of policing, and an opportunity to sit in rooms that many in the past would have rather not graced.
Entrance to the museum is in Martlett Court off Bow Street, and it is currently open Fridays and weekends. Details here.
