You can see the door to Oscar Wilde’s Reading Gaol prison cell in Nottingham’s National Justice Museum. But now you can see the dock where he stood in Bow Street Magistrates Court for his preliminary hearing in 1895 after losing his libel case against his lover’s father who had publicly accused him of being a ‘somdomite” [sic]. Later that same year, Wilde was arrested under the Labouchere Amendment, which prohibited ‘gross indecency’ between men. Reading Gaol was the place where he was incarcerated for most of his two-year sentence, but he also spent time at Pentonville Prison and Wandsworth Prison. However, you could say that Wilde’s battle with a homophobic legal system began in Court Two in Bow Street Magistrates Court.
The court is now fancy five-star hotel NoMad. Court One is now an elegant ballroom; Court Two no longer exists in any form. But when NoMad discovered the dock from Court Two, they passed it next door to the Bow Street Museum of Crime & Justice, where, with the help of £118,428 from the National Lottery Fund, the dock was restored. Most of the wood is original, and once the plastic covers over the railings were removed, the metal, too. There are hopes in the future that visitors to the small but fascinating museum will be able to stand in the dock, too, reliving Wilde’s fall from grace.
One person who has managed to stand in it already is Alastair Whatley from Original Theatre. His acclaimed one-man show, The Importance of Being Oscar, a revival of Micheál Mac Liammóir’s play from 1960, is about to be presented at Park Theatre, after previous runs at the Jermyn Street Theatre and Reading Rep. At the press viewing of the dock that was in use for over 125 years, Whatley talked of Wilde’s gifts and faults. The Irish dramatist was given ample opportunity to escape before his trials at the Old Bailey, but, perhaps believing that his fame and wit would save him, decided to have his day in court.
Another person to stand in the old dock this week was Simon Tansley, the Director of the Bow Street Museum of Crime & Justice. He discussed how Wilde’s dock is the first part of next year’s Echoes from the Dock exhibition, which will examine the relationship between the LGBTQ+ community and the law. Of course, given the small space, this won’t be an exhaustive survey, but Tansley plans for the project to go digital, collecting stories from members of the LGBTQ+ community and their run-ins with the police, good and bad. Tansley revealed that there would be some very special Wildean memorabilia on show.
It’s a long history, however. Perhaps it will begin with the famous crossdressers Lady Stella and Miss Fanny, who scandalised Victorian society and escaped prosecution because the court couldn’t prove that they engaged in sodomy. The Labouchere Amendment of 1885 changed this, though, and now queer men could be arrested for just looking at another man in the wrong way. While relatively few men were arrested under the law before the Second World War, the use of ‘pretty policemen’ to entrap men looking to have sex in public toilets escalated in the 1950s.
The 80s saw tension between the police and those protesting Thatcher’s Clause 28, which forbade schools from talking about homosexuality as a family relationship. Who can forget the lesbian protestors who abseiled into the House of Lords and stormed a BBC studio when the news was being read live? The 90s saw a new wave of protests calling for the age of consent for gay men to be reduced to 16, the same age as heterosexuals. It’s important to note that Clause 28 wasn’t repealed in England and Wales until 2003, while the age of consent wasn’t reduced to 16 across the whole of the UK until 2008.
And there’s the future too. How will the police enforce the new rules that trans people use the bathrooms designated to their birth gender rather than the gender that they now identify with? Oscar Wilde’s dock is not just a historical artefact but a symbol of state oppression.
Bow Street Museum of Crime & Justice is located at 28 Bow Street, WC2E 7AW. Opening times are here.
The Importance of Being Oscar is at Park Theatre from 22 July until 22 August 2026. Tickets here
