venta

Last week, ChrisC asked me if I wanted to see inside the Supreme Court. He was faffing with a laptop at the time, and I assumed he meant some kind of virtual tour. Around the US Supreme Court.

No, he said, really inside. The UK's Supreme Court.

Err... I said, we don't have one. I mean, obviously we have a supreme court, that's how hierarchies work. But we don't have a The Supreme Court. There's a bit of the House of Lords that does the job.

Which just goes to show that I have apparently had my head in a bucket for the last, ooh, decade or so. How did I miss this? The Constitutional Reform Act, 2005 mentioned that hey, maybe the people who make the law should be completely separate from the people who administer the law. And so the Law Lords stopped sitting around in the House of Lords; across Parliament Square there is now a Supreme Court with its own Justices.

Who knew? Well, probably quite a lot of you, actually. Just not me. I think I can faintly hear the sound of kauket banging her head against her desk.

After passing the Act, there were a few years of refurbishing Middlesex Guildhall and the shiny, new Supreme Court opened there with a blare of trumpets (literally) in 2009.

On Saturday, it was having an open day. Did we fancy wandering around? Well, not hugely, to be honest. I've been in modern courtrooms, and they're not that exciting. Whereas I'm conceptually interested in the Supreme Court and its function, I feared its recently-furbished actuality would be pretty banal.

Which shows how wrong I can be (again), really. I dutifully trundled along, and inside the impressive early-20th century building is a really beautiful fusion of old and new. Courtroom One is the full works: a lofty stone chamber with carved wooden supports for the ceiling, fabulous art noveau-ish chandeliers, stained glass, and more heraldic beasties than you could shake a prickly stick at.



The beasties are lovely, though.



Courtroom two, in comparison, is a very modern affair but still lovely as well as functional. It's light and airy, with fabulous velvet curtains and a friendly clock. There's a glass sculpture showing the logo of the Supreme Court above the Justices' seats.



The logo includes a rose (for England), leek leaves (Wales), thistle (Scotland) and flax (Northern Ireland); the motifs are repeated across the patterned carpet and up the curtains. It's a really hard room to photograph "nicely", so here's a quick snap of one side of it.



It feels like a pleasant place, and hopefully not as daunting as the heavyweight glamour of Courtroom One might be to some people. One wall is engraved glass - there seems to be a lot of glass in the more modern parts of the Court. I like it, though we did wonder if in a hundred years it will look dated in a way the carved wooden angels and intricately leaded internal windows will not.

They also let us wander round the library, a wood-panelled room decorated with quotations about justice - from Ovid to Martin Luther King - and the exhibition space in the basement. You can prod at screens to see if you agree with important rulings the Supreme Court has made, and admire various bits and bobs of official gifts sent from other nations. Including a chunk of marble from the US Supreme Court, sent as a sort of "well done, you've finally got one, too".

Overall, for a court building, it's surprisingly friendly. Having been fitted out recently, it's properly accessible - among other things, it was designed to address the fact it was really hard for the public to attend the old Law Lords' sessions. You can, I believe, just show up and sit in on hearings during the working week.

There's a handful more photos up on Flickr.