The Romance of the Robing Room

 

When I was a young barrister I would sometimes appear at Bow Street Magistrates' Court (now, as for numerous former courts, an eye-wateringly expensive hotel) and when the hearing was over I would wander across the road and watch the Royal Ballet in rehearsal. Back then I knew many of the dancers and eventually I was invited to watch a ballet from the wings. Being backstage for Romeo and Juliet or Swan Lake was an utterly intoxicating experience. The dancers would pirouette off stage smiles beaming and collapse exhausted as soon as they were out of sight. The transition from private preparation space to performance arena is, for obvious reasons, not something that many performers want witnessed. The dressing rooms at Wembley and backstage at Glastonbury must have a very similar feeling.

So too barristers' robing rooms. I occasionally think that the best argument for the retention of court dress is that if we didn't wear robes we wouldn't need robing rooms and if we didn't have robing rooms what then? Robing rooms can be very, very indifferent spaces. Poorly furnished, poky, strewn with defunct case papers. Notoriously one of the robing rooms at Snaresbrook sported a pair of mislaid dentures for months on end.

And yet, irrespective of the quality or dimensions of the physical space, robing rooms are special. It's where barristers don their armour and while that armour may be less substantial or menacing than that worn by gladiators in the Colosseum these are no less adversaries preparing themselves for battle. And, like the locker room at Wimbledon, one of the key features of the robing room is mutual respect for those others that have chosen this strange life of competitive public speaking.

Robing rooms are surprisingly fun, often fun in a way that is bewilderingly at odds with the subject matter of the day's work. They are usually ringing with laughter, or at least they were. The last few years have been very hard on the Bar and hard therefore on the camaraderie of the robing room. Long before Covid arrived the government's relentless austerity drive hit the courts particularly hard. Sitting days were driven down and many court rooms sat empty. The furniture got yet more threadbare and buckets proliferated to capture drips from leaking roofs. 

When Covid did turn up in March 2020 the robing rooms literally fell silent as courts were closed. Since then courts have reopened but are not functioning anything like they did before. The courts are struggling with an almost impossible backlog and individual barristers are swamped with their own personal mountains of unresolved cases. The difficulty of getting trials listed, up and running and completed means that cases, even the most serious cases, are consigned to a purgatory of waiting.

Robing rooms now have the feel of dugouts behind the front line with harried and fretful barristers hoping that their trial actually makes it to a verdict or skittering resentfully out of the door wondering why they've been made to attend court in person just for some dates to be set.

These are spaces where the esprit de corps of the Bar was forged, where some of the most important work on cases took place, crucial negotiations on pleas and the admissibility of evidence were resolved, it's where pupil barristers really learned the job watching their supervisors interact with opponents, friends and colleagues.

Being a barrister is an intensely lonely occupation. You are solely responsible for the decisions you make in and out of court and those decisions can weigh very heavily, sometimes for years after they have been made. The robing room has always been an antidote to that loneliness. A safe space where you don't have to explain the stresses, where everyone else in the room just gets it.

The Bar is in the midst of a financial negotiation with the government to try and safeguard its future and the future, therefore, of English and Welsh justice. The vast majority of us are self-employed and qualified for no furlough funding. Indeed 2020 was for me, and for many others, an unsought for unpaid sabbatical. If robing rooms are to revive the government is going to have to ensure that practice as a criminal barrister remains a viable occupation. Otherwise barristers will continue unrobing in droves and justice will be stripped naked.