About
The Old Courthouse in Long Street was built as an integrated machine for dealing with crime in a small Cotswold town: a police station at the front, cells behind it and a magistrates' court above, so that a prisoner could be arrested, held and tried without ever leaving the building. Completed in the middle of the nineteenth century, shortly after county forces were established under legislation that finally obliged counties to maintain a professional constabulary, it embodied a new idea about policing — uniformed, salaried, permanent and locally accountable — replacing the parish constables and watchmen who had preceded it.
The building served that purpose for well over a century.
Today it houses the Tetbury Police Museum and Courtroom, which is unusual in preserving the whole sequence rather than a single room. Visitors can stand in the cells, look at the fittings, and then go up into the courtroom where the bench, dock and clerk's desk survive in position.
The collection covers the Gloucestershire Constabulary and its predecessors through uniforms, helmets, truncheons, handcuffs, lamps, whistles, rattles, cutlasses, charge books, warrants, photographs and personal effects of serving officers, together with the domestic material of a rural police station, since Victorian constables and their families frequently lived on the premises.
The court material documents the everyday business of a petty sessional division: drunkenness, poaching, assault, vagrancy, bastardy orders, licensing and the small-scale theft that made up the overwhelming bulk of nineteenth-century prosecutions. That ordinariness is the museum's real strength. It is not a collection about famous crimes but about routine justice as it was actually administered in a market town, in the rooms where it happened.
Admission is free, the rooms are open on weekdays and Saturday mornings, and free tours led by experienced volunteers run on Wednesdays and Fridays.
It sits on a handsome Cotswold street a short walk from the market house, and it takes under an hour, which makes it an easy and rewarding stop. It is also a useful corrective.
Long Street is precisely the kind of honey-coloured Cotswold frontage that draws visitors expecting an unbroken picturesque, and the building behind one of those facades turns out to have been the local apparatus of arrest, detention and summary punishment — a reminder that these towns were governed as well as admired, and that the machinery of that government was housed on the same streets as the wool merchants' houses.
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Plan Your Visit
⏱️ Recommended Visit Duration
💡 Visitor Tips
- Visit on a Wednesday or Friday if you can. Free tours with experienced volunteers run between 11am and 3pm on those days and add a great deal to the experience.
- The rooms are open Monday to Saturday from 10am to 3pm, and the museum is closed on Sundays.
- Go upstairs to the courtroom. Visitors who stop at the cells miss the best part of the site, and the two rooms only make sense together.
- Stand in a cell with the door pushed to for a moment. It is the exhibit that stays with people.
- Allow forty-five minutes unaccompanied, or an hour if you take a tour.
- Note that the courtroom is on the upper floor with no lift, and the cells have steps and narrow doorways, so access is limited for wheelchair users.
- There are no toilets, café or shop on site, but Long Street and the Market Place a few minutes away have a good range of places.
- Combine the visit with the Market House and the Chipping Steps, and with Westonbirt Arboretum five miles away for a full day.
Highlights
The Victorian cells
The cells behind the charge room survive with their original fittings and are the part of the site that most affects visitors. They were built to a specification designed for security and deterrence rather than comfort: heavy studded doors, observation apertures, plank beds, minimal light and no privacy of any kind.
Standing inside one with the door pushed to conveys the reality of nineteenth-century detention more directly than any amount of interpretation, and it usefully complicates the picturesque view of Victorian small-town life that a Cotswold street otherwise encourages.
The magistrates' courtroom
Upstairs the courtroom survives with its bench, dock, clerk's table and public seating substantially in position, so the geometry of a petty sessions hearing is immediately readable — who sat where, who stood, who looked down on whom. Rooms like this were once in every market town and have almost all been converted to other uses or stripped of their fittings.
Being able to stand in the dock, look up at the bench and grasp the physical relationships of the court is the single best reason to visit, and it is what makes this more than a display of police equipment.
One building, the whole process
The Old Courthouse was designed so that arrest, detention and trial all happened under one roof, with the police station at the front, cells behind and the court above. Very few such buildings survive intact and open to the public, and the completeness is what distinguishes this museum from collections of police memorabilia elsewhere.
Walking the route a prisoner would have taken — through the charge room, into a cell, then up the stairs into the dock — makes the Victorian criminal justice system legible as a physical sequence rather than an abstraction, which is a genuinely unusual thing for a small museum to be able to offer.
Gloucestershire Constabulary equipment
The collection holds uniforms, helmets, tunics, truncheons, handcuffs, lamps, whistles, rattles and cutlasses spanning the county force's history from its foundation in the late 1830s onwards. The progression is informative: rattles gave way to whistles, oil lamps to electric torches, and the cutlass — genuinely issued to rural constables in the early years — quietly disappeared.
Each change reflects a shift in what policing was expected to be, from an armed force facing possible disorder to a uniformed civil service dealing mainly with drunkenness and petty theft.
Collections
The collection documents policing and summary justice in Gloucestershire, principally from the establishment of the county constabulary in the late 1830s to the twentieth century. Holdings include uniforms, helmets, tunics, truncheons, handcuffs, cutlasses, lamps, whistles and rattles, together with charge books, warrants, court registers, summonses, photographs and the personal effects and service records of individual officers.
Domestic material reflects the residential character of rural police stations, where constables and their families lived on the premises.
The building itself — a mid-nineteenth-century combined police station, cell block and magistrates' court with its cell fittings and courtroom furniture substantially intact — is the collection's most significant asset, preserving the complete physical sequence of arrest, detention and trial in a single structure.
The Cells and Charge Room
The original police station accommodation and Victorian cells, with their fittings intact, alongside constabulary uniforms, equipment and station records.
The Magistrates' Courtroom
The upper-floor court with bench, dock and clerk's table in position, interpreted through charge books, registers and warrants recording the everyday business of the petty sessions.
Themes
Time Periods
Current Exhibitions
No current exhibitions. Please check the museum website for updates.