Royal Courts of Justice

The Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand in London, generally known as the Law Courts, house the Court of Appeal and the High Court of England and Wales. The monumental complex was built between 1873 and 1882 to designs by George Edmund Street in a Victorian Gothic Revival style and counts among the last great buildings of the English Gothic Revival. Street died of overwork before the building was finished; his son completed it. The central Great Hall, with its mosaic floor, is 24 metres high and 73 metres long, and more than 1,000 rooms sit behind the jagged sandstone facade. Historic cases here have ranged from the suffragette movement and Oscar Wilde to modern libel scandals and the dissolution of the Beatles in 1971. The court rooms are open to the public while hearings are in session - airport-style security, then you can watch barristers in horsehair wigs at work.