The warehouses around Gloucester Docks were built for corn and timber and now hold flats, an outlet centre and a museum, with the county's civil and family court close by. The change says a lot about the city. Gloucester is Gloucestershire's county town, where the Crown Court, the county council at Shire Hall, the constabulary's headquarters at Quedgeley and the county's main hospital all sit, and where a county of farms, engineering works and Cotswold villages goes to law. Cheltenham, eight miles up the road, has the racecourse and the spa; Gloucester has the courts.
The courts in Gloucester
Gloucester Crown Court hears the serious criminal cases from the whole county, from Tewkesbury to the Forest of Dean, and the magistrates' court in the city deals with the rest. Civil claims, divorce finances and children cases go to the county and family court, which sits in Gloucester near the docks. Employment tribunal claims are listed in Bristol and often heard by video. An arrest leads to the county's custody suite, where the duty solicitor is free whatever your income.
What brings Gloucester people to a solicitor
The city's work has three sources. Engineering and energy first: the landing-gear factory on the edge of the city, the nuclear generation headquarters at Barnwood and the manufacturers along the M5 produce redundancy, TUPE, restrictive covenant and patent questions. The public sector second: the councils, the police and the hospital on Great Western Road employ a large share of Gloucester and bring grievances, discrimination and whistleblowing cases. The countryside third: dairy farms in the Severn Vale, sheep on the Cotswold edge, the Forest of Dean with its commoners and free miners, and estates whose succession, tenancies and boundaries keep rural practices busy. Housing runs through everything: terraces in Barton, Tredworth and Kingsholm, semis in Longlevens and Hucclecote, new estates at Kingsway and Hunts Grove with their management charges, converted warehouses by the water, and the question, since the floods of 2007, of whether a street is insurable. Wills and probate are steady work, and the cathedral city's charities depend on legacies.
Fees, legal aid and how to choose
Gloucester's firms are mostly small or mid-sized, many with a second office in Cheltenham, Stroud or the Forest, and their prices reflect a county town rather than a city. Conveyancing, wills, powers of attorney and the divorce application are fixed-fee almost everywhere; disputes are hourly, with a written figure for each stage. Legal aid survives for crime, for family cases involving domestic abuse or the county council's children's services, and for some housing matters, though contracts are fewer than they were. Household insurance may include legal expenses cover. Every firm here is regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority, and the featured firms have additionally passed the site's verification.
Using this page
Each area of law has its own Gloucester page below, with the firms that practise it listed underneath. The Gloucester search finds a solicitor near any address from Quedgeley to Churchdown, and the Gloucestershire search covers Cheltenham, Stroud, Cirencester and the Forest. Bristol's larger firms have their own Best Solicitors in Bristol page, and Hereford and Worcester have searches of their own. The legal insights section explains the common problems first.
