Old Bailey

The Central Criminal Court, "universally known as the Old Bailey," is a crown court centre in the City of London that hears cases from the City and Greater London and cases remitted to it from elsewhere in England and Wales. The City of London Corporation owns and administers the building, and the central chair in each of its courts is reserved for the Lord Mayor. Its courthouses have stood on the line of the Roman city wall beside Newgate prison; a courthouse completed in 1785 was enlarged in 1824, and ten years later an Act of Parliament extended the court's jurisdiction beyond the City and Middlesex to parts of Essex, Surrey and Kent and to British ships on the high seas. The present building, designed by Edward Mountford, was opened by King Edward VII in 1907, restored and enlarged after air-raid damage in 1941, and damaged again by an IRA car bomb in the 1970s.¹ The act of 1834 is the Central Criminal Court Act, 4 & 5 Will. 4, c. 36.²

Espionage and State Secrets

George Blake, the MI6 officer who had worked for the Soviet Union, was exposed in 1961, tried at the Old Bailey, convicted on five counts of passing information useful to an enemy, and sentenced to 42 years, then the longest term imposed by a British court.³ In 1992 three directors of the machine-tool maker Matrix Churchill, bought in 1987 by a holding company controlled from Baghdad by Iraq's Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialization, were tried there for deceiving the export licensing authorities; the trial collapsed, and the collapse produced the Scott Inquiry.⁴⁵

The Maxwell Pensions

Kevin Maxwell and Ian Maxwell, sons of Robert Maxwell, were prosecuted by the Serious Fraud Office over the removal of the Mirror Group pension funds' assets and tried at the Old Bailey; in January 1996, after a trial of about eight months, the jury acquitted both of conspiracy to defraud, and in September 1996 prosecutors decided not to pursue a second trial against Kevin.⁶⁷

Terrorism Trials

David Copeland, the London nail bomber, was convicted at the Old Bailey on June 30, 2000, of three murders by nail bomb and sentenced to six life terms.⁸ Prosecutions under the Terrorism Act 2000 followed. The first wave of National Action prosecutions ended in convictions there in July 2018.⁹ On June 18, 2019, Judge Rebecca Poulet QC sentenced Michael Szewczuk and Oskar Dunn-Koczorowski of the Sonnenkrieg Division, calling their material "abhorrent as well as criminal by reason of their clear intention to encourage terrorist acts."¹⁰ Jacek Tchorzewski pleaded guilty there on June 21, 2019; Harry Vaughan was sentenced there in November 2020 by Mr Justice Sweeney, who called him "a dangerous offender"; and a Cornish teenager of the Feuerkrieg Division, whom the Crown Prosecution Service called Britain's youngest terrorist, received a youth rehabilitation order there in February 2021.¹¹¹²¹³ Benjamin Hannam, a serving Metropolitan Police constable, was convicted there of National Action membership on April 1, 2021, and the Sonnenkrieg founder Andrew Dymock of fifteen counts in June 2021.¹⁴¹⁵ Danyal Hussein was convicted there on July 6, 2021, of murdering the sisters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, and Cameron Finnigan was sentenced there on January 16, 2025.¹⁶¹⁷