Old Bailey

The court began as the sessions house of the Lord Mayor and Sheriffs of the City of London and of Middlesex, and also held trials of the kind the travelling Courts of Assize heard elsewhere. The original medieval court is first mentioned in 1585, standing next to the older Newgate Prison, and appears to have grown out of an endowment to improve the gaol and provide rooms for the sheriffs, made possible by a gift from the 15th-century Lord Mayor Richard Whittington.

The Great Fire of London destroyed it in 1666. The replacement, built in 1674, was left open to the weather in the belief that this would stop the spread of disease.

The building was re-fronted in 1734 to enclose the court and reduce the influence of spectators, and the enclosure brought outbreaks of typhus. In 1750 sixty people died, among them the Lord Mayor Sir Samuel Pennant and two judges, Sir Thomas Abney and Charles Clarke. The court was rebuilt again in 1774, and a second courtroom added in 1824. More than 100,000 criminal trials were heard here between 1674 and 1834.

In 1834 the Assize Court for London was renamed the Central Criminal Court. Its remit had covered crimes committed in the City and Middlesex, but in 1856 public revulsion at complaints that the doctor William Palmer was a poisoner and murderer raised fears that he could not be fairly tried in his native Staffordshire. The Central Criminal Court Act 1856 was passed so that his trial, and other cases with a public profile, could be held at the Old Bailey.

The court adjoined Newgate Prison, and in London cant it was sometimes called The Gate, an abbreviation of Newgate. The condemned were led along Dead Man's Walk between the buildings, and many were buried in the walk itself. Large, rowdy crowds sometimes gathered and pelted the condemned with rotten fruit and stones. A persistent claim holds that after twenty-eight people were crushed to death when a pie-seller's stall overturned, a tunnel was cut through to St Sepulchre's church opposite so the chaplain could reach the condemned without forcing his way through the crowd; no primary source or photograph is known that shows it existed.

Hanging in the street outside remained a public spectacle until May 1868.

Newgate Prison closed in 1902, the year the present main block dates from; Edward William Mountford designed it, on the site of the demolished gaol. King Edward VII opened it officially on 27 February 1907. Above the main entrance is the inscription "Defend the Children of the Poor & Punish the Wrongdoer". F. W. Pomeroy's gilt bronze figure of Lady Justice, made in 1905-1906, stands on the dome holding a sword in her right hand and the scales in her left; she is popularly taken for blind Justice, though the figure wears no blindfold, an omission the courthouse brochures put down to Lady Justice having originally gone unblindfolded.

Bombing during the Blitz severely damaged the building. Reconstruction restored most of it in the early 1950s, and in 1952 the Grand Hall beneath the dome reopened, its decoration including paintings commemorating the Blitz.

A new South Block, designed by Donald McMorran and George Whitby to house more modern courts, was built between 1968 and 1972 over the former site of Newgate Prison, demolished in 1904. In 1973 the Belfast Brigade of the Provisional IRA exploded a car bomb in the street outside, killing one person and injuring two hundred; a shard of glass is kept embedded in the wall at the top of the main stairs. The stenographers' offices in the hall closed in March 2012 when technology replaced them. On 7 February 2024 around 1,500 people were evacuated after a fire and reports of five separate explosions at the rear of the building; defendants on remand were returned to prison and juries sent home.

Mountford's block has been protected as a Grade II* listed building since February 1970. His Majesty's Courts and Tribunals Service manages the courts and administers the trials, while the City of London Corporation pays for the building's maintenance, running and staff out of its own resources; ownership is attributed both to the Corporation and to the City Bridge Foundation, whose committee has reserved benches in Court 1. Until 2017 the court manager held the ancient City title of Secondary of the City of London. The Crown Court sitting here hears major criminal cases from Greater London and, exceptionally, trials referred from elsewhere; hearings are open to the public subject to stringent security.