Central Criminal Court of England and Wales, or, the Old Bailey: Pic of the Week

The following is a guest post by Alexander Salopek, a collection development specialist in the Collection Services Division of the Law Library of Congress. He previously wrote posts on Fred Korematsu’s Drive for Justice, Fred Korematsu Winning Justice, What a Difference 17 Years Made, Frances Glessner Lee and the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, and The Coroner’s Court, Westminster, London, among others.

While one a recent trip to London, after visiting Saint Paul’s Cathedral and heading to a Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese (a drinking haunt of both Samuel Johnson and Charles Dickens) I came across the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales, also known as the Old Bailey  (I recognized the iconic gilded Lady Justice statute from Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta). This version of the building was finished in 1907 by Mounford, according to the Heritage List for England. The building serves primarily for hearing cases from London but also hears cases remitted to it from England and Wales. What I found most exciting about researching the Old Bailey was not the building itself, but the stories of the trials held there. There is an incredible resource of digitized proceedings called the Proceedings of the Old Bailey 1674-1913. Doing some basic searches and reviewing the materials available there, one can find the stories of non-elite individuals throughout this period of time. I read a number of cases, from petty crimes to some more serious ones, though the most infamous one I found, involving Oscar Wilde, was sadly not as informative or salacious as one would have hoped.

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