At The Clerkenwell Sessions House

Anyone who knows Clerkenwell knows the old sessions house which dominates the western side of the green, yet few have ever been inside. Built around 1780, it is mostly remembered as the location of Charles Dickens’ early employment as a cub reporter, reporting on court cases. Subsequently, he wove the location into his novels and this where Oliver Twist was tried after being caught stealing a pocket watch on Clerkenwell Green.

Joseph Merceron, the corrupt magistrate and gangster, known as the Boss of Bethnal Green once held court here, sentencing those who displeased him to Cold Bath Sq prison, a mile to the north.

Yet the sessions house was closed for judicial use nearly a century ago and has been the headquarters of a scalemaker and a masonic hall, permitting only few visitors and thus – all this time – it has stood in Clerkenwell as an enigma that could not be explored. For at least thirty years, I have walked past and wondered about what might lie inside before I entered through the front door last week to encounter its spectacular interior, with a dome modelled after the Pantheon, reborn in its full glory following a comprehensive four-year renovation.

At the centre of the sessions house is a magnificent hall containing a staircase ascending to the first floor with a vast opalescent glass screen and a gallery that enfolds the space, beneath the dome towering overhead. The building is oriented upon an east-west axis and you discover yourself inside a huge light box, with rays of sunlight refracting, bouncing and playing upon all the surfaces. Removal of twentieth and late nineteenth century architectural interventions have reinstated the austere classicism of this interior with thrilling results.

From here, I set out to explore the side rooms by means of the myriad hidden staircases that lead to the upper and lower floors. Whereas the central hall has been repainted in its original stone and old-white tones, these secondary spaces retain the attractive patina of ages prior to any redecoration that future tenants may enact. Despite the logic of the central hall, these staircases create the feeling of a warren, linking unexpected spaces – so that you may equally discover yourself in the magistrates dining room or the holding cells. While the atmosphere of institutionalised violence enacted in the name of the judiciary by Joseph Merceron and others has been dispelled from the public spaces, it is inescapable in the basement where the arrangement of cells is apparent and the nature of confinement is palpable. It will be a sobering thought for the customers of the bars and wine vaults that are planned for these spaces.

Quite soon, the Clerkenwell Sessions House will be filled with people again and restored to life as a place for meetings and transactions both business and social in nature. Yet at this moment, as the restoration draws to completion and the grand rooms sit empty, it enjoys a short-lived adjournment inhabited only by the ghosts of former days.