Hicks Hall
courthouse in Clerkenwell, London, England
Hicks Hall, or Hickes' Hall, was a courthouse at the southern end of St John Street, Clerkenwell, London. It opened in 1612, and was closed and demolished in 1782. It was the first purpose-built sessions house for justices of the peace of the county of Middlesex (including the City of Westminster), and became the main court of petty sessions and arraignment for more serious offences, including cases involving plots, attacks and minor transgressions against the state.
The hall stood at the start of the Great North Road, running from London to York and Edinburgh, and was routinely used as the datum point for measuring mileages along that route.
Prehistory and location
From at least the 1540s, the Middlesex justices regularly held their sessions in an inn at the southern end of St John Street. This was one of the closest points in the county of Middlesex to the City of London, lying immediately north of Smithfield Bar, a tollgate on the City boundary. Two inns were used at different times: the Castle, on the west side of the street, and the Windmill, slightly further north on the east side.
In the 1570s, Elizabeth I granted a lease of waste land in the street to the surveyor Christopher Saxton for building a new sessions house, but nothing more is heard of this project.
Hicks Hall
In 1609, James I was petitioned by the magistrates of Middlesex for a new site for a sessions house. The petition was successful, and this time the building was erected, being completed in 1612.
“Hicks Hall” enters the record as courthouse in Clerkenwell, London, England. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Hicks, Hall and courthouse can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 25, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q5751376. Authority coordinates are 51.521, -0.102. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1612, 1782 and 1609.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hicks Hall” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.