Tag Archives: Inn

21Mar/15

Staples Inn

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Staples Inn is not so much an institution as an experience. It used to be one of the Chancery Inns that legal students signed up to and then moved on to Gray’s Inn. These days the buildings are full of (mostly) legal chambers, but they do not appear to have a teaching motive, as Gray’s Inn does. Dickens had a very soft spot for Staples Inn and you can see why in the pictures on this page. If you leave Holborn and go up to High Holborn, you’ll see an archway under the big black and white Tudor building on the intersection of Grays Inn Rd and High Holborn. You will walk into the cool, dappled light of the courtyard right. You can read the signs over the doorways and discover that when they rebuilt the buildings after a bomb destroyed them in the Blitz, they used as many timbers from the original buildings as they could find. There is an archway in the building on the other side of the square and you then walk into the beautiful garden immediately below with its lovely fountain.

Staple’s Inn courtyard

Staple’s Inn courtyard

Dickens described Staples Inn as a ‘little nook composed of two irregular quadrangles’ in Edwin Drood. You have to agree with him. It’s not public land like a park, but there are no restrictions except you can be removed by the servants if you make noise or enter with a dog….

Staple's inn

Staple’s inn

Dickens: “It is one of those nooks the turning into which out of the clashing street, imparts to the relieved pedestrian the sensation of having put cotton in his ears, and velvet soles on his boots. “ I couldn’t agree more, the atmosphere is still exactly as Dickens described it.

Dickens further says, “Moreover, it is one of those nooks which are legal nooks; and it contains a little Hall (below) with a little lantern in its roof: to what obstructive purposes devoted, and at whose expense, this history knoweth not.”

The Hall, Staple’s Inn

The Hall, Staple’s Inn

The clock, dated 1757, is accurate. You won’t be late back to work. You can just see this clock on the Hall, by the windows above the door.

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20Mar/15

Lincoln’s Inn

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Lincoln’s Inn is another of the four great Inns of Court that have dominated London for nearly 1000 years. It covers a large area – if you walk into the gate below right in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, you can leave the Inn on Chancery Lane. I couldn’t fit the entire building into one photo. This picture below shows the library part of the main building and just to my right there is the great Hall, which is the dining room and members area. In the grounds is a beautiful, large Regency building containing lots of legal chambers and behind a central lawn, dominated by a fountain and “Keep off the Grass” signs, there is a long five-storey black brick construction called Old Buildings that dates from the 1600s.

To get there from Holborn, turn left up to High Holborn and walk to Pendrells Oak pub. Turn left into a grubby, smelly (guess why) little lane called Gt Turnstile and follow it into a large square with a park in the middle. The park is called Lincoln’s Inn Gardens, and every street around the park is called Lincoln’s Inn Fields…

The Library, Lincoln’s Inn

The Library, Lincoln’s Inn

There is a nice little kiosk in Lincoln’s Inn Gardens where you can eat lunch, or you can walk through this gate, below, into an altogether much more beautiful and luxurious semi-private garden in Lincoln’s Inn itself, where you can eat your lunch from a brown paper bag and imagine you are a wealthy lawyer.

Lincoln’s Inn main gate

Lincoln’s Inn main gate

Lincoln’s Inn has a very nice chapel with an odd feature. This is the first time I have seen a ground-level crypt. The flagstones in the picture below are actually headstones and you can wander about in the crypt and read the stories of mostly Victorian lawyers. During the Blitz a bomb fell in the courtyard and blew out all the windows. Inside the chapel there are memorials and coats-of-arms of the leaders of Lincoln’s Inn. These men were also powerful members of England’s elite.

The crypt, Lincoln’s Inn Chapel

The crypt, Lincoln’s Inn Chapel

I first read John Donne in high school and then studied him at university. I didn’t realise he was a London poet and the chaplain of Lincoln’s Inn, but I did know he was a clergyman, with the same language of passion for his girlfriend as for his religion. A most interesting chap. This tiny piece of stained glass window, below, which would fit into a saucer, is part of his record in the chapel. There is also an evocative portrait and a coat of arms.

John Donne memorial window in the Chapel of Lincolns Inn

John Donne memorial window in the Chapel of Lincolns Inn.

20Mar/15

Barnard’s Inn

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This is the entrance to the Hall of Barnard’s Inn. A beautiful, fascinating little courtyard with old date stones, a story on the wall, the coat of arms of the Baden Powell family – and this glorious, small Hall. The Hall itself dates from the late 1300s, but in a chamber beneath, the southern wall is chalk and tiling from the Roman period, 2000 years ago. In 1252 the estate was recorded in the property of the then mayor of London Sir Adam de Basyng, and in the mid 1400s became one of the Inns of Chancery. Law students would enrol here for some time, then move on to Grays Inn, to which Barnards Inn and Staples Inn were associated.

The Hall, Barnard’s Inn

The Hall, Barnard’s Inn

It’s a strange place; to get to; from Holborn Circus walk up Holborn, cross Fetter Lane and look for the Barnards Inn archway on your left, with a Gresham College sign. Go boldly down the short alley and it opens out into this courtyard. Young couples sit here eating their lunch and on a sunny day the courtyard is warm and cosy, with historic carved stones set into the walls and an interesting story about the Mercers’ School carved into a large slate. After you have explored the courtyard you can move onwards under another arch into an altogether more modern courtyard, left, then beyond that again, back onto New Fetter Lane. It’s hard to tell you have almost turned back on yourself.

The courtyard, Barnard’s Inn

The courtyard, Barnard’s Inn

This Flemish lady shows Sir Thomas Gresham’s status as Royal Agent of Antwerp.

Sir Thomas Gresham’s status as Royal Agent of Antwerp.

Sir Thomas Gresham’s status as Royal Agent of Antwerp.

In Dickens’ time, Barnards Inn had fallen badly into disrepair and in Great Expectations young Pip came to London and found “Barnard to be … a fiction, and his inn the dingiest collection of shabby buildings ever squeezed together in a rank corner as a club for tom cats.“ In the 1890s the Mercers’ Company renovated the building and moved their boys school here from College Hill for about 60 years, closing in 1959.

The whole site has been purchased by Gresham College and you can now attend free lectures here, in this lovely Hall, at lunchtimes or about 6pm, mostly on Tuesdays. The Gresham Professors were set up in the 1500s and studied and taught the following disciplines: Astronomy, Divinity, Geometry, Law, Music, Physic (medicine) and Rhetoric. Even today the lectures follow the same themes – great topics, though – “Mathematics in the modern age – The 18th Century; Crossing bridges” and “Handel and London” and “Should we take our leaders as seriously as they take themselves?.”

20Mar/15

Gray’s Inn

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The Inns of Court are ancient institutions and as you walk around our neighbourhood you’ll see signs of them: Staples Inn, Clifford’s Inn, Furnvials’s Inn, Barnard’s Inn, but there are four really famous ones – Lincoln’s Inn, Inner Temple, Middle Temple and Gray’s Inn. They have a serious teaching function, but many of their buildings are also occupied by operating legal chambers. You join one as a law student and through them, you get “called to the bar” ie become a barrister. Not everyone who joins an Inn becomes a barrister, or even wants to, but there are few other ways to become a lawyer, and none (until 2004) if you wanted to be a barrister.

Gray's Inn

Gray’s Inn

If you walk up High Holborn to Chancery Lane tube station, you will meet Gray’s Inn Rd at the lights. Cross the road and then just past the Cittie of Yorke pub, turn right into Warwick Ct  – you’ll miss it if you blink. At the end of it, through an imposing arch, is an entrance to Gray’s Inn. These are the arms of each of the Inns and the notice “School of Law.” Gray’s Inn has the gold griffin on a black background.

Inns of Court

Inns of Court

Famous people associated with Gray’s Inn? Queen Elizabeth I was patron and “a loving glass” is still raised to Good Queen Bess. Shakespeare performed his plays there, and part of a captured Spanish galleon has been made into a wooden screen in the Hall. Thomas a’Becket was chaplain of the chapel and he occupies the centre of the stained glass triptych behind the altar. Sir Francis Bacon was a member as was Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt.

The Walks, as the gardens are called, were laid out by Sir Francis Bacon and much of what he did endures. Verulam Buildings on Gray’s Inn Rd were named after him. Almost all the buildings were destroyed by German bombs in WW2, but a few choice buildings survive.

At the entrance to Gray’s Inn you’ll see a nice bronze relief of Sun Yat-Sen, who overthrew the Manchu dynasty in China in 1911. You could say “We taught him everything he knew…”

Sun Yat Sen

Sun Yat Sen