Inside the Inner London Juvenile Court, c. 1909-1953

Abstract

This article considers the workings of an individual juvenile court – the branch of the Inner London Juvenile Court, which sat at Old Street from 1910 and Toynbee Hall from 1929. It examines the spatial environment of the juvenile court before using data sampled from the court registers between 1910 and 1950 to analyse the progress of children and young people through the court and the strategies used by the magistrates to deal with them. Finally, it looks at the social work backgrounds and connections of the magistrates at this court, the ways in which this impacted upon their practice, and the consequences of this for the development of youth justice and welfare policy since. I argue that the welfarist principles of the 1908 Children Act were worked out both at grassroots and policy formation levels during the interwar and early post-war periods, before becoming the mainstream position in youth justice by the 1960s.