Snaresbrook Crown Court is a historic, Grade II listed building situated in Snaresbrook, an area within the London Borough of Redbridge. It is one of 12 Crown Court centres serving Greater London and is designated as a third-tier court. It is set within 18 acres of grounds and has its own lake, known as Eagle Pond. It operates 20 court rooms and manages 7,000 cases a year, making it the busiest Crown Court centre in the United Kingdom. Construction of the building began in 1841 and finished two years later. It was built in the Jacobean gothic style by the English architects George Gilbert Scott and William Bonython Moffatt, who were prolific designers of workhouses, hospitals and churches. Snaresbrook Crown Court was originally built as an orphanage at the behest of the philanthropist Andrew Reed who named it the Infant Orphanage Asylum; later it became the Royal National Children's Foundation. Under various titles, it remained an orphanage until 1938 when it became the Royal Wanstead School. The building continued as a school until 1971 when it passed into the ownership of the British government who converted the building into a crown court at a cost of £1.6m in 1973. The building opened as a crown court on 26 November 1974. Since becoming a court, the building has had various extensions added externally and has received many alterations to its interior. In 1988 an outer annex, not connected to the original building, was built to accommodate further court rooms, to a cost of £3 million. The court is located on Hollybush Hill, and is opposite the junction to High Street, Wanstead. The nearest tube station is Snaresbrook on the Central line.
History
Design and plan
The building was designed by George Gilbert Scott and William Bonython Moffatt who were in partnership between 1835 and 1844 and were prolific designers of workhouses, hospitals and churches, although it was Scott who designed the external appearance of the building. The building was an early commission for Scott, who had been in practise for around 10 years. The appointed builder was William Jay, who was based at Tower Hill. The original building was built to a 'H' plan. The original ranges are constructed of London stock brick, with a coursed, squared and hammer-dressed Sneaton stone facing, and Bath and Caen stone dressings to the front and side elevations. The roofs are covered using Westmorland slate and lead. Internally, there are cast-iron beams that support its timber floors. To the rear is the former assembly hall, added in 1862, which is built using London stock brick with slate roofs. Further to its exterior there are stone mullion and transom windows, turrets and ogee domes. The round arched entrance features an entablature above the main doors with the inscription "A structure of hope built on the foundations of faith by the hand of charity", which is flanked either side by arcaded ground floors. Rain water heads around the main building carry the date "1842", emboldened on the front face. At the south end of the main range there is a chapel, which was added in 1860, indicated by dated rainwater heads to the walls. Internally, the chapel has a wide chancel arch with a canted apse and some stained glass windows, depicting the Life of Christ and Acts of Mercy, by William Morris. It is two-storeys high and is six bays long by five bays wide. It has a quarry-faced plinth, ashlar quoins and stepped buttresses between Perpendicular windows to the ground floor. The chancel window has four trefoil-headed lights beneath more elaborate curvilinear tracery.
Upon its completion, the interior of the orphanage was sparely fitted out and was described in The Builder as being "lofty and lacking comfort". The architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner, in his Buildings of England series of books, described the building as an "impressive, but rather dull symmetrical Jacobean composition".
Orphanage The Wanstead Infant Orphan Asylum was founded by the philanthropist Andrew Reed in 1827 and was based in Hackney. In the 1830s, and owing to a lack of space in the current building, Reed applied to the Crown Estate for a section of land in Snaresbrook, which was then part of Wanstead Forest, and a grant to help fund the building of a new premises. The application was successful and construction started on 27 June 1841. Scott and Moffatt were chosen to design the orphanage; the foundation stone was laid by Albert, Prince Consort in 1841. The Infant Orphanage Asylum was officially opened on 27 June 1843 by Leopold I of Belgium. It is designed in the Jacobean gothic style and cost £35,000 to construct. Queen Victoria was the first in a long line of royal patrons. The 1881 census recorded there being 74 staff and over 400 children at the institution. The charity's eligibility criteria required that children had to be either fatherless or entirely orphaned; under the age of seven; and that their late fathers would have to have been considered by the trustees to be either "creditable" (not earning less than £50 a year upon their death), "respectable" (£100 a year), or "very respectable" (£400 a year). In exceptional circumstances, the institution accepted children whose fathers were still alive but "subject to confirmed lunacy or paralysis", according to a reporter for the Derbyshire Courier. Once admitted the institution would house and look after the children up to the age of 15. The youngest recorded child to reside at the orphanage was a six-month-old girl in 1849. An infirmary was added to the orphanage in the 1850s, followed by the chapel in 1860, an assembly hall in 1862 and a swimming pool in 1880. By 1860 there were 595 fatherless children housed at the orphanage. King George V, who was the patron of Reed's charity, renamed the asylum the Royal Infant Orphanage, in 1919.
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
