Building record BSE 784 - The Old Shire Hall

The Old Shire Hall occupies an historically sensitive site to the south of the Great Churchyard in Bury St Edmunds and is bisected by the course of the Scheduled 12th century Abbey precinct wall. The oldest part of the building adjoins Honey Hill to the south of this wall and is a red-brick structure of the early-18th century that originally possessed a steeply pitched roof with dormer windows as shown on an engraving of 1741. It was designed as a court house and still contained a Nisi Prius Court for less serious offences to the west and a Crown Court to the east when it closed in 2016, precisely as shown on a detailed plan that coincidentally also dates from 1741. A court is known to have occupied the same site since the late-16th century, supposedly originating as a monastic school, and there are references to a timber-framed predecessor in the mid-17th century. The present building has seen many famous cases including that of the Red Barn murderer William Corder, whose body was cut open and laid out here for public display after his execution in 1828. Warren’s map of 1748 depicts an ostensibly early-18th century Grand Jury House that projected to the north and was remodelled with a Greek Revival colonnaded facade in 1842. In 1906 this was entirely replaced by the existing four-storied ‘Edwardian Baroque’ range which now dominates the churchyard. In addition to court staff this range accommodated the offices of the new West Suffolk County Council, and in the 1930s these were extended into the adjoining grade II*-listed St Margaret’s House on the east.
18th century brick floors still survive beneath the two courts and the southern facade retains an original window aperture with impressively chamfered quoins. This was the only window in the entire southern wall in the characteristic manner of early courts which were often lined with tiered benches and lit from above. In the late-18th or early-19th century the entire building was raised in height by approximately 2 m as indicated by a clear break in the brickwork and the present shallow-pitched slate roof with its two imposing lanterns was probably installed during a major refurbishment of 1804. The same refurbishment saw the addition of a Greek Revival facade to the western gable, with a moulded stone pediment above a Doric frieze incorporating vertically channelled triglyphs with mutules and circular guttae beneath. Remarkably, this new facade was obscured in 1818 by a narrow flat-roofed extension with a matching frieze and rendered pilasters as shown on a plan of 1822 and later replicated in the new Grand Jury House. A number of exceptional fixtures and fittings survive from this Georgian remodelling, including a matching internal cornice in the Nisi Prius Court and the roof lanterns which also boast Doric friezes. The court benches and layouts date chiefly from the 19th and 20th centuries, but much of the panelling in the Crown Court where Corder would have heard his fate is fully pegged in the manner of the 18th. The Edwardian range preserves most of its fixtures and fittings including Arts and Crafts fire surrounds, Art Nouveau door handles, elaborate Rococo plaster ceilings (particularly in the Grand Jury Room), and a substantial Regency-style main staircase with a stained glass window incorporating the arms of Suffolk, Bury St Edmunds and Sudbury (S1).