I Rest My Case

It’s an arresting location: a hotel and restaurant in Knutsford’s 200-year-old former court building. LOUISE ALLEN-TAYLOR visits Barristers restaurant at The Courthouse Hotel and delivers her verdict

- Louise Allen-Taylor

IF MOST restaurant design is about imposing character on a blank space, the creation of Barristers in Knutsford plainly entailed changing as little as possible.

Sitting amid acres of dark wood beneath a vast vaulted ceiling and a majestic skylight, you are still, very obviously, in a court of law. All the furniture attending the dispensing of justice is still there, though moved around a little. The vast central cocktail bar, for instance, was once the dock - a place of abject misery reimagined as a font of joy. Dining tables now sit where once jurors and anxious relatives of the accused would perch. It’s grimly fascinating to realise that the likes of Alan Turing were tried within these walls, the codebreaker and computer pioneer sentenced to chemical castration for gross indecency in 1952.

Leaving so much of the former courtroom in place may have cost a few covers, but it has paid dividends in terms of the restaurant’s ambience. Well done to owners Flat Cap Hotels, whose first project was The Vicarage at Cranage.