Given the recent turnover in the job, it is a bold move to carve the lord chancellor’s name in stone. But last week the City of London did that twice, at the top of two great grey slabs marking the start of construction at the capital’s new ‘justice quarter’ on Fleet Street.

Obiter welcomes the development, even though it has meant the demolition of the classically-fronted Chronicle House, designed and built in 1924 for the newspaper trade (and eventually occupied by a branch of Sainsbury’s). The Hack & Hop pub was another sad loss. But let’s face it, nobody mourns the 1970s brutality of Fleetbank House, drab home to a succession of quangos and obscure bits of the government machine that could not be accommodated anywhere else.

More important than the architecture is the human factor. As well as the new courts complex, the development will host the headquarters of the City of London Police. It will be a magnet for supporting services – yes, including pubs – as well as lawyers and journalists. Unlike most of the City, it will be a meeting point for a vibrant mixture of people doing real hands-on jobs, some of them around the clock. A bit like the old Fleet Street in the hot-metal print era, perhaps.

Of course it could go horribly wrong: perhaps the master of the rolls’ vision for a ‘funnel’ of electronic courts will render the whole complex redundant before it opens in 2026. And perhaps by then the City’s policing will be conducted entirely by surveillance camera and drone.

But at least the justice quarter is a stab at reviving a part of London where so much history was made. And preserving the name of The Rt Hon Brandon Lewis CBE MP for the benefit of archaeologists in future millennia.

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