WARWICK COURT HOUSE

 

The recent ‘Heritage’ Opens Days at various venues in the town, and at which Society members acted as guides to the building, led the Society to prepare a ‘History briefing’ on the Court house. This is reproduced below.

A house on this site formed part of the Castle estate from an early date, and was one of the perquisites of the office of constable and porter of the Castle in 1510. It was called the Cross Tavern. It took this name from the medieval High Cross, which stood in the middle of the road at the crossing of the east-west and north-south streets and was regarded by John Leland in 1535 as the beauty and glory of the town.

The burgesses of the new Warwick Borough were given the use of the building, now called the Court House, by their Charter of 1554, but the Castle still claimed an interest and it was not until after the establishment of the Leycester Hospital as their Guild Hall in 1571 that the Court House was finally conveyed to the burgesses.

Part of the building, later known as the Mayor’s Parlour, incurred bills for wood, ale and pipes, which implies that Corporation hospitality was also dispensed here. In 1694 the Mayor’s Parlour was damaged in the Great Fire, which luckily did not cross Castle Street, but the High Cross, an arcaded building, was removed during the rebuilding of the town and never replaced. Damage to the Court House was estimated at a mere £15; it was repaired and continued in use, but in 1724 a decision was taken to rebuild it.

The architect chosen was Francis Smith of Warwick, and ironwork was by Thomas Paris and Benjamin King, also local men. The cost during the years 1725-31 came to £2254, which was considered extravagant and provoked a Chancery suit, on complaints that it was used ‘only for feasting and card playing’; the building was in the hands of the sequestrators until 1761. The reason for rebuilding was probably a social one, since the grandest feature of the new building is certainly the ballroom, with its musician’s gallery. Outside, the figure of Justice, in a central niche over the door, serves as a reminder that the magistrates’ courts were also held here. The figure was cast in lead by Thomas Stayner in 1731, painted to look like stone.

Canaletto, on one of his visits to the Castle in 1748 or 1752, not only painted the Castle itself, but also made a drawing of St. Mary’s church and Church Street, showing the new Court House on the right. It was exact in every detail except that in the picture it is surmounted by a balustrade topped with slender urns. A balustrade with urns was used on the rebuilt St Mary’s church, to join the old work to the new, on which Francis Smith was also employed as a mason, but opinions differ as to whether this was actually carried out in the Court House. Canaletto is known to have altered buildings in his pictures to improve the composition, and he included in this drawing a wholly fictitious building in place of the Aylesford Hotel. A photograph of the Court House taken in about 1900 shows a solid parapet. This may have been installed in the nineteenth century, and this remained until the present balustrade, without urns, was constructed in about 1979.

The Court House is built of Warwick sandstone which has been repaired many times using stone from other quarries, such as Hollington near Cheadle in North Staffordshire. There have been many changes internally. The ground floor room now used as the Council Chamber by the Town Council was the Magistrates’ Court until 1974. The earlier names on the panel of bailiffs and mayors until 1902 were compiled by Thomas Kemp, himself a former Mayor. Two unusual portraits in this room are of Nicholas Eyffeler and his wife Katherine. He was a glazier who died in 1591 and founded the town’s earliest charities. The Ballroom upstairs has been redecorated many times. The chandeliers were the finishing touch to a scheme in 1953-55; one of them was presented to the Borough by the then newly-formed Warwick Society. In the most recent repainting, the wooden Ionic pilasters were marbled to great effect.

The original Cross Tavern property included three shops in Castle Street, which were let, but there were numerous small private houses in what is now the Pageant Garden. The garden takes its name from the very successful 1906 Warwick Pageant. The large house next to the Court House in Jury Street belonged in the nineteenth century to the influential Greenway family, and by 1850 its garden had extended behind the Court House to a gateway into Castle Street. George Cattell Greenway became Town Clerk and a partner with his brother Kelynge Greenway, in Greenway, Smith and Greenways Bank; both were implicated in the bank’s spectacular failure in 1887 and served terms in goal. The house was on the market at the time of the Pageant. It was bought with the proceeds and presented to the town; it became the Pageant House and its enlarged garden the Pageant Garden, now a much valued green oasis in the town centre.

- Written by Michael Farr on behalf of the Warwick Society © 2006

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