The west front of Peterborough Cathedral has looked across the square since the thirteenth century, and almost everything else about the city is newer than it looks. Designated a new town in 1967, Peterborough built townships at Bretton, Orton and Werrington within a generation, then Hampton on the old brick pits, and it remains one of the fastest-growing cities in England. The brickworks drew Italian families after the war, the food and distribution industries drew Eastern European and South Asian workers later, and the result is a city where a solicitor's waiting room hears a dozen languages in a morning.
Courts and law firms in Peterborough
Peterborough Combined Court Centre, close to the river south of the city centre, houses the Crown Court, the county court and the family court, and takes serious criminal cases from across Cambridgeshire. Peterborough Magistrates' Court deals with the rest, and HMP Peterborough holds both men and women. Employment tribunal hearings are usually by video. The city's law firms gather around the cathedral precincts and the centre, with smaller practices in the townships, and Whittlesey, March, Stamford and Oundle all look to Peterborough for legal work they cannot get at home.
A city of newcomers
Growth drives the work. New-build estates at Hampton and on the city's eastern and northern edges keep conveyancers busy with estate charges, shared ownership and the legacy of leasehold houses, while Victorian terraces in Millfield, New England and Gladstone pass between landlords and families, many renting rooms in houses in multiple occupation. Employment questions come from the distribution sheds along the A1(M) and at Fengate, from Perkins Engines, from the hospital at Bretton and from the food factories of the Fens: agency work, shift patterns, holiday pay, TUPE transfers, and the treatment of workers whose first language is not English. Family work reflects a young, mobile population: children arrangements between parents on opposing shifts, marriages that began abroad, and care proceedings brought by the city council. Wills must often deal with property in Italy, Pakistan or Lithuania as well as in Peterborough, and farming families on the Fens around Thorney and Eye need succession planning.
Paying for a solicitor
Fixed fees are usual in Peterborough for conveyancing, wills, lasting powers of attorney and uncontested divorces, and hourly or staged fees for disputes; get the figure in writing first. Legal aid covers police station advice for everyone, most criminal cases subject to a means test, and family cases involving domestic abuse or care proceedings; several Peterborough firms hold contracts, and some offer interpreters or multilingual staff. Home or car insurance sometimes includes legal expenses cover, so read whether you can get legal help for free first. All the firms on this site are SRA-regulated, and featured firms have also passed the site's own verification of their contact details, SRA record and public reviews.
Using this page
The areas of law below are each explained for Peterborough with the firms that practise them underneath. The Peterborough search finds firms closest to any address in the city, the Cambridgeshire search covers the whole county, and the Lincolnshire search reaches Stamford, Bourne and Spalding. The south of the county has its own Best Solicitors in Cambridge page, and the legal insights library explains the law in plain English.
