Locksmith Old Bailey: Justice Without The Blindfold Everyone Assumes

High above the courthouse, a gilt bronze figure of Lady Justice holds a sword and a set of scales. Sculptor F.W. Pomeroy completed her in 1906. Most people assume she wears a blindfold, the usual artistic shorthand for impartial judgment. She doesn't. Look closely and there's nothing covering her eyes at all. The court's own official explanation leans on something rather unusual: her maidenly form, the brochures claim, already guarantees fairness, rendering a blindfold entirely redundant. It's a curious piece of institutional reasoning that's survived largely unchallenged for well over a century.

The building beneath her has its own history of getting things badly wrong, at least once with serious consequences. Back in 1674, the court was deliberately built without full enclosure, left open to the air specifically to stop disease spreading among crowded trial-goers. That logic held until 1734, when builders refronted the structure and properly enclosed it. Sixteen years later, in 1750, that decision proved catastrophic. A severe typhus outbreak tore through the enclosed court, killing roughly sixty people, including the sitting Lord Mayor and two judges outright.

A Walk Named For Exactly What It Was

Condemned prisoners once made a final journey along a passage connecting the adjoining Newgate Prison directly to the court. People grimly nicknamed that route Dead Man's Walk. Many of those who made that walk were buried within it afterward, their final steps and resting place genuinely one and the same. One tradition survives from that era in gentler form: every judge sitting at the Old Bailey today, whatever their formal rank, gets addressed simply as My Lord or My Lady. We're concerned with something considerably less ceremonial. A lock near the Old Bailey gets fixed properly, whatever tradition or tragedy happens to be attached to the building nearby.