The Shire Hall on High Pavement, completed in 1770, served as Nottingham's main criminal court for two centuries; beneath and behind it lay the county jail. The complex closed as a working court in the 1980s and has since been turned into a museum that uses the actual courtrooms, cells, exercise yards and the old gallows trap.
Sessions led by costumed re-enactors put visitors in the dock or on the jury for re-staged 19th-century trials, and a separate exhibition covers policing, crime fiction, and the history of punishment in England. The atmosphere in the surviving cells — Victorian women's wing, condemned men's row — does the heavy lifting. Good for older children but probably too dark for younger ones.