Portsmouth Guildhall (also known as Portsmouth Courthouse)
The Portsmouth Town Hall stood in the middle of High Street from the sixteenth century until its demolition in 1837, a building that served simultaneously as council chamber, courthouse, and civic centrepiece across three centuries of continuous use. Rebuilt at least twice — once in 1739 on foundations laid by Mayor John Vining, and again in 1795 when a chamber supported by Corinthian columns was added at the first-floor level — it was the venue for the borough's quarter sessions, its court of record, and the countless petty and criminal trials through which the law imposed itself upon the lives of Portsmouth's inhabitants. It was here, on 15 April 1807, that William Jeffries stood trial for the theft of Josiah Blackwell's pocket watch, and it was here that Magistrate Cornelius Blackwood sentenced him to seven years' transportation — a verdict delivered beneath a ceiling that had absorbed the pleas and protests of the accused for nearly seventy years, and would continue to do so for thirty more.
