On the edge of the City of London, near to Smithfield meat market, stands a reminder of England's grim past: the Middlesex Sessions House.
    From here convicted criminals were sentenced to death - there is a condemned cell in the building used as a linen cupboard - transported to Australia and much else that befell enemies of society in those days.
    Today it is home to 230 London lodges, 70 Chapters, 160 Lodges of Instruction and other degrees and is known as the London Masonic Centre. It even has its own website at www.london-lodges.org/clerkenwell. It is also a very successful conference centre for non-masonic events.
    The original Sessions House was built nearby in St John's Street between 1611 and 1612 by Baptist Hicks, later Lord Campden, and was known as Hicks's Hall. The trial and subsequent execution of 29 regicides who put Charles I to death was held here.
    Later, Hicks's Hall was demolished and a new building - on the current site - was built between 1779 and 1780 at Clerkenwell Green, its current site. The Sessions remained active until 1920.
    Until 1803 stocks were sited on the Green in which drunkards were traditionally secured. Those ordered for transportation would leave the Sessions House in chains, and be taken through connecting tunnels to nearby Newgate Gaol - now the site of the Old Bailey Central Criminal Court - to await the ships to take them to Australia.
    Masons who climb the narrow iron, spiral stairs in corners of the Old Sessions House are treading the same footsteps as those who were "sent down" to the cells in the basement of the building, now a cosy bar called, appropriately, the Dungeon Bar.
    A similar stairway links a small room with what was once a court, where the accused waited for their case to be heard - in manacles. These manacles were found chained to the wall when the committee of masons looking over the building before purchase looked in the room.
    Today, brethren pass money over the ground floor bar for drinks, but in its past, the same area was used for money also - to pay over fines. Such is the march of progress!
    The building was altered and enlarged in 1860 because crime had increased in line with an expanding population. Above the doorway to what was the new court is a magnificent representation of Queen Victoria's Royal Arms.
    A unique feature of this former courtroom (now a lodge room) is the clock. Handmade in 1780 and rebuilt in 1843, with one face visible outside the room, and another face inside, it has an ingenious reversing mechanism showing the same time on both faces. The clock was made in Clerkenwell, then a noted area for well-known clockmakers.
    The Central London Masonic Centre Ltd bought the dilapidated building for £300,000 in 1979. The building stood empty for nearly a decade after its days as a court ended in 1920, and in 1931 the Avery Organisation, that manufactured weighing machines, took it over. Avery stayed in the building until 1973, when it again remained empty for some time, adding to the decay.
    Of course, such a building must have its ghosts. During refurbishment one workman claims that he felt someone standing by him who said "I'll give you a hand."
    And, on certain autumn afternoons, at sunset, it is said a grey, young woman can be seen sitting on the staircase adjacent to the main bar on the ground floor, then floating up the stairs. And what of the cold and forbidding feeling noted in one of the second floor rooms?
    Do ghostly figures watch today's masonic ceremonies? Better tell the tylers and janitors to keep their eyes peeled even more diligently for "cowans and intruders".

The author wishes to thank the Central London Masonic Centre for permission to base this article on the book The Old Sessions House: History of the London Masonic Centre by Len Cacutt and published by CLMC Ltd.