Bow Street Magistrates' Court and Police Station

Bow Street Magistrates' Court (formerly Bow Street Police Court) and Police Station each became one of the most famous magistrates' courts and police stations in England.

Over the court's 266-year existence it occupied various buildings on Bow Street in Westminster, immediately north-east of Covent Garden, the last of which opened in 1881 and incorporated the police station previously on another site on the street. It closed in 2006 and its work moved to a set of four magistrates' courts: Westminster, Camberwell Green, Highbury Corner and the City of Westminster Magistrates' Court. The senior magistrate at Bow Street until 2000 was the Chief Metropolitan Stipendiary Magistrate.

The building is grade II listed, - the court areas now form a hotel and the station part houses the Bow Street Museum of Crime and Justice.

The first court at Bow Street was established in 1740, when Colonel Sir Thomas de Veil, a Westminster justice, sat as a magistrate in his home at number 4. De Veil was succeeded by novelist and playwright Henry Fielding in 1747. He was appointed a magistrate for the City of Westminster in 1748, at a time when the problem of gin consumption and resultant crime was at its height. There were eight licensed premises in the street and Fielding reported that every fourth house in Covent Garden was a gin shop. In 1749, in response to calls to find an effective means to tackle increasing crime and disorder, Fielding brought together eight reliable constables, known as "Mr Fielding's People", who soon gained a reputation for honesty and efficiency in their pursuit of criminals. The constables came to be known as the Bow Street Runners.

Fielding's blind half-brother, Sir John Fielding (known as the "Blind Beak of Bow Street"), succeeded his brother as magistrate in 1754 and refined the patrol into the first truly effective police force for the capital. Among those tried at the court was Giacomo Casanova.

The early 19th century saw a dramatic increase in number and scope of the police based at Bow Street with the 1805 formation of the Bow Street Horse Patrole, which covered to the edge of London and was the first uniformed police unit in Britain, and in 1821 the Dismounted Horse Patrole which covered suburban areas. A Metropolitan Police station was also established at numbers 25 and 27 soon after the force was established in 1829. Officers were sent from there to police the Coldbath Fields riot in 1833.

In 1876 the Duke of Bedford let a site on the eastern side of Bow Street to the Commissioners of HM Works and Public Buildings for a new combined magistrates' court and police station at an annual rent of £100. Work on the current building to a design by the Office of Works' surveyor Sir John Taylor began in 1878 and was completed in 1881—the date 1879 in the stonework above the door of the present building is when it had been hoped that work would finish. Historic England's listing entry describes the architectural style as "dignified, eclectic Graeco-Roman with some slightly Vanbrughian details, rather in the Pennethorne manner."

In 1878 gazetteer Walter Thornbury published that the establishment, still called generally a Magistrates' House, consisted of "three magistrates, each attending two days in a week". He added: