Bow Street Police Museum

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In seventeen forty-nine, a magistrate at Bow Street tried something London had never had.

Henry Fielding paid a small group of men to go out and investigate crime, and they became known as the Bow Street Runners.

They were trained, they were paid, and they were attached to the court.

The museum here calls them London's first official law enforcement service, and this was decades before the Metropolitan Police existed.

The building in front of you came much later, the police station and magistrates' court that opened in eighteen eighty-one.

The cases heard here reached well beyond ordinary crime.

In eighteen ninety-five, Oscar Wilde was held overnight in a cell here.

In nineteen oh eight, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst stood in its dock, after a suffragette demonstration at Parliament.

Most of the building is a hotel now.

But part of the old station is the Bow Street Police Museum, where you can walk into the cells and see the police and court history kept inside.

This is a free stop onThief-Takers and Hidden Rooms: Covent Garden and the Temple.