COUNTY ADMINISTRATION: SESSIONS HOUSES

The records in the series MA/S cover general maintenance at Hicks Hall, the building of a new sessions house on Clerkenwell Green and subsequent repairs to it, it's deeds and contracts, and papers concerning the Westminster Sessions House in the Nineteenth Century. There are several tenancy agreements for places in which to hold late Nineteenth Century petty sessions in Brentford, Edgware, Spelthorne, Uxbridge and Kensington. Further references are made to the sessions houses and their maintenance in the yearly sessions papers (MJ/SP)

The material is arranged in one series - MA/S/001 - 551

These records are available for public inspection, although records containing personal information are subject to access restrictions under the UK Data Protection Act, 2018

Until the seventeenth century the Middlesex court met in the Castle Inn near Smithfield, which was replaced in 1612 by a new sessions house built in Saint John's Street, at the expense of a leading justice, Sir Baptist Hicks. Essentially only a wooden building, Hicks Hall, as it was known, was demolished in 1782, a new sessions house having been built on Clerkenwell Green in 1779, and also known as Hicks Hall. In 1889 following the reduction in size of the County of Middlesex, the sessions moved to the Westminster Guildhall in Broad Sanctuary. When this building proved too small for the amount of work carried out there, a new Middlesex Guildhall was built next to it and opened in 1913. The new County of London sessions continued to meet on Clerkenwell Green until 1919 when they moved to the former Surrey sessions house on Newington Causeway. Prior to 1752 the Westminster sessions met in the Town Court House near Westminster Hall; thereafter in "a building of great antiquity" demolished at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In 1805 the Westminster Guildhall was built in Broad Sanctary, and enlarged in 1888 and 1889 before the Middlesex sessions moved there. Lack of space prompted the building next door of the Middlesex Guildhall in 1913. From the Eighteenth Century onwards small groups of justices meeting outside of the main sessions became commonplace (Petty Sessions), and their hearings took place in their own homes, local tavern or other local meeting place