Andrew Ashdown

LONDON NOW:

An Oyssey Through the Nation's Capital

 

6 HOLBORN

 

We head at last, to the City. Or is it? Are we really there yet? One doesn’t feel so, until one has crossed the Fleet and not really until one has negotiated St. Paul’s.

 

The spot is marked by the rather magnificent griffin (or gryphon) by Charles Bell Birch on its grandiloquent plinth by Sir Horace Jones; as are, in kitsch variation, all entrances to the City. There was, of course, once a more explicit indication, for here stood Temple Bar before its removal to Theobalds Park in Hertfordshire (which might have amused the diarist), thence back to Paternoster Square (→ 7.St. Pauls).

 

Will you, wo’n’t you, will you, wo’n’t you, will you join the dance?

Will you, wo’n’t you, will you, wo’n’t you, wo’n’t you join the dance?

 

£220 for Fleet Street. Things are looking up.

 

THE INNS OF COURT

Enter then the rabbit-hole and pass into the Square Mile. First up, what Woodward & Jones term ‘Legal London’. But let’s not get into terminology and labelling; I have a thing about that (see further ramblings on this at Heron Tower → 10.City2). So now. I think of these buildings, that wend a corridor though the very heart of London, this extraordinary, hidden world – for that is what it is, hidden behind so many doors and courts and passageways – unbidden and withdrawn, unlike the rampant office blocks ahead. Here, interconnecting and courts and loggias lead to beguiled seclusion; here, within a spit of bustling, bursting London, the Strand and High Holborn, concrete slabs give way to crunch of gravel, the roar of traffic to voices echoing off stone walls, the shouts and hoots of the New Alsatia to barely audible dialogue through half-opened sash windows; the blandishments of advertising hoards and blinking neon to carved wood and peeling plaster. Here a sloping garden holds the Thames its own; there, the church predates the Conquest, halls vie with Hampton Court. Here, in other words, lies, by every definition, a university town, a town within a town, under our very noses yet as remote in ‘feel’ and spirit as Oxford or Cambridge.

 

So, let us go then, you and I ....

 

The Inns have such a cornucopia of facility and appointment as to be beyond the ken of the New Normal, commuters, shoppers, chuggers, trifling tourists, other birds of passage. Consider: a view of the Thames, a seat in the front row, as it were, to rival the Savoy or Parliament, a sloping lawn into that prospect. Add: the ambience of college quads and courts, hidden alleyways, passages and secret doorways, controlling egress to grandiloquent halls and wainscoted chambers. At its heart, the ancient Temple Church (two for the price of one - again), St. Dunstan’s standing sentinel, if somewhat Orthodoxly now.

 

Most inveigling, however, is the urban vector thus achieved, inscrutably, at the perpendicular, right across the City – from Inner and Middle Temple to Grey's Inn, taking in the Law Courts, the erstwhile Library, Lincoln's Inn, even, arguably, Bow Street and the Old Bailey, Staple Inn. Cutting through the predominantly east-west prerogatives and imperatives of the City.

 

And that cutting across (subliminally signalled at Bush House) is not, as you might have imagined, hindered or compromised by the several arteries that must be negotiated – Embankment, Fleet Street, Holborn, Theobalds – but rather, of course, emphasised thereby, cameo’d by the very juxtaposition, counterpoint. For, were the Inns coherent, a discrete and gated campus, they would lose that tincture; indeed, they are sharpened by this very intrusion, titivated by this torment, delineated by the enforced peregrination from end to end, north or south, having to negotiate these arteries. By this is obtained the sense of a discrete and hidden world: secret, secretive, privileged, unbeknown yet furnishing nonetheless a pleasurable progression, aided in places by narrow entrances and alleys, vestibules, anterooms, narthexes, antechambers, porches; in others, exposed suddenly to the rush of City traffic, necessitating the scampering o’er, like rats, to find again retreat, seclusion, among the ivy-clad walls and cobbled pavements.

 

In this way, the Inns of Court create their own geography, dimension, vortex, as at Horse Guards Parade, or others we shall come to (e.g. an extra aisle in the Church of the Immaculate Conception, Farm Street (→ 19.Mayfair).

 

Also, as I recall, in Birmingham - Edgbaston, to be precise. The bus from home would head along the Harborne Road toward the centre, passing the usual suburban mix of pre-War terrace and '60s estate before suddenly dropping down into a small valley, hardly more than a depression, but notable for its swathe of grass and abundance of secluding foliage. This was (is) Chad Valley: a row of up-market shops and an Italian restaurant - lending prosperity to the scene but passing in a flash so that, before you knew it you were out and on your way again, deeper into the urban mangle. However, if, on the other hand, you were to come at this defile from a different direction, that is, from north (Hagley) or south (the University) and so cut across at right-angles, on the perpendicular, you would have a wholly different experience. For then you are following the Valley – the line, precisely, of Chad Brook – and the incidence of grass and tree is dominant. There is, in the twist and slope of Westfield Road, the strips of allotments, an appreciation of the angle of declivity, the contours of the landscape, indeed, an almost rural air pervading and the views forward and back hidden by the intrusion of slope and verdure, of untamed nature. To come upon the main artery from this bearing is to find an aberration: you approach from the viewpoint of a rabbit or hedgehog, surprised at the cataclysmic intrusion upon the rural idyll, and there is nothing for it but to scamper across, avoiding cars and buses, bikers, diving safely back into cover in order to regain once more the country lane.

 

As seems! Imagination has stretched the point. There are others: the cycle paths (‘Red Ways’) of Milton Keynes, which intermittently fetch up at a road or pavement, find some clever (hard) landscaping solution to effect the meeting, then run on again into verdure and underpass, mocking or inviting the pavement or car-bound onlooker (though from early on wanting in the security aspect). One such path follows the old disused railway line thereabouts, seeking out superfluous tunnels and abandoned stations, empty platforms (useful for leaning one’s bike against), ghostly sheds.

 

One final analogy (if you will bear with me), brings still more curiouser intent. I speak of the trams in Vienna (Budapest, Warsaw, Manchester), moving smoothly on their unstoppable course, seamlessly from road to track, then back, here joining traffic, there heading off to run alongside a railway platform or enter a tunnel and so mimic the underground, emerging to vector across acres of cobbled square and cock a snoot at fuming drivers ... You step aboard: “Is this the train, bus or underground?” “Alle drei!” must come the brisk reply. It is magical, in a way; as if you’ve slid suddenly sideways and insinuated another dimension, one invisible to ‘normal’, earthly types going about their quotidian business.‘

 

‘There’ but ‘not there’. Is this what the after-life promises? Is this what the little men in pince-nez and white coats are on about, with their talk of eleven ‘hidden’ dimensions, of string theory, quarks and all the rest? Let’s hope so.

 

And if you want to pursue this channel northward to Gray’s Inn then please dive ahead and we will meet you there – for we have only the whole City to peruse (and another trip within that!) so if your legs are tired and you cannot ‘fly’ then we will catch you anon, provide reception and receive you, o lackadaisical traveller, with “Oh there you are!” or some such.

 

As already hinted (→ 3.Whitehall) the Inns of Court provide us with as near as obtainable a picture of pre-Fire London, at least as far as its governmental appointments are concerned: the Palaces at Whitehall and Westminster being each no more than a vast huddle of courtyards, halls, passageways, shambling, rambling, inchoate space. Pepys was among their vast retinue of humble drudges, moving from Fleet Street to Axe Street, Westminster.

 

All this would have been different if Wren had had his way, of course – not just in his own resplendent version of Whitehall Palace but for the entire burnt-out City - and westward. But, despite the despatch with which the City churches, and especially St. Paul’s, began to appear, there was no stomach for the Haussmann type earth-shaking change - which seems to contradict the pattern of remorseless upheaval, unquenchable hunger for novelty Ackroyd attributes to the Metropolis. The reason was a yet stronger, primordial force: the elemental fact of rights and property; money, lucre. Hence little change; evolution, iterative, as we saw.

 

The iterative process - indeed. As in drawing, the final image only emerging from a rigorous application of small dots and strokes to the paper, gradually, carefully, in the manner of a monk of Lindisfarne or Iona, building up the illusion; as with a jigsaw, invisible ink, the pattern emerges, the mosaic is revealed and, just as Pepys, flushed with enthusiasm and optimism, ruled 282 pages of his notebook, leather bound and gilt edged, so one savours that first dab on the canvas, first hesitant stroke upon the watermarked cartridge paper. Writing away, writing away: what will emerge? Will persistence alone yield the victory? Will the mere act of relentless creation produce, through mere momentum, a worthwhile result? Pepys embarked on his Diary on 1st January 1660, intent on writing – something! He had no idea what. The Diary, according to Claire Tomalin, may have been a means to finding out. 

 

So to these legal, anachronistic, sleight-of-hand, re-imagined purlieues. We begin at the beacon – ‘X marks’ the spot’ - of the Griffin. But more assuredly is the lanterned church, St. Dunstan in the West, wherein Pepys worshipped, Donne held benefice, Isaak Walton acted sidesman; well, frankly, if you look at any church in London, you’re going to find (hello!) famous people who worshipped, were christened, baptised, married, buried, preached or caused a riot. In this case, Sweeney Todd. The original C11th church was destroyed and the new is by John Shaw & Shaw Junior, 1831-33, an ingenious octagonal plan making the most of a restricted site and unexpectedly spacious within. ‘Watery’ modern glass, in the words of the Poet Laureate, replaced the late Georgian. This lantern is very like All Saints, York (c.1400 and earlier than the more famous and lofty Boston Stump). And also on a pavement.

 

And beyond, la Sainte Chapelle’s flêche of Street’s Law Courts (Henry III would have been jealous). But first ....

 

Inner and Middle Temples

Okay we’re here now. ‘…those bricky towers,

The which on Thames’ broad aged back doe ride,

Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers,

There whilom wont the Templar knights to bide,

Till they decayed through pride.’ – Spenser, Prothalamion (1596).

 

Middle Temple Hall is undoubtedly the main interest, conceding only the Temple Church itself which we come to last. The hammer-beam ....the date the size, er, um very similar in scale to the Banqueting House some sixty years hence, both dwarfed by Westminster Hall. As this is a matter of such intense competition among the corporate venues of London today – and not just in the City – let’s get nerdy:

 

Relative Size of Venerable Halls - length x width x height, ceiling type, build date

 

Westminster Hall 240 x 68 x 92 hammer beam, 1394-1402

Guildhall 152 x 49 hammer beam, 1411-29

Crosby Hall 21 x 8 cross brace, 1466, repainted 1966

York Place Long Gallery 250 x 23 gilded stone vault, after 1514

Carew Manor 61 x 52 hammer beam, c.1550

Eltham Palace 100 x 36 hammer beam, 1479

Middle Temple Hall 151 x 40 x 59 hammer beam, 1562-70

Banqueting House 110 x 55 x 55 plaster, 1619-22

Custom House Long Room 190 x 66 x 55 coffered elliptical, 1825

2 Temple Place 35 hammerbeam, 1895

The Great Chamber Charterhouse Elizabethan

Royal Courts of Justice 238 x 48 x 80 stone vault, 1874-82

 

 

The Temple Church is all alone in its cylindricality at least among churches in the capital (with only 3 other medieval churches in the country in use: Holy Sepulchre, Cambridge; St. John the Baptist, Little Maplestead, Essex and The Holy Sepulchre, Northampton) though the form as we have seen is occasionally attempted by other building types (see box in →22.Knightbridge). The inspiration may have been the Dome of the Rock, itself more overtly inspired by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre). Much revered of architectural pundits, church-crawlers, English Heritage bigwigs, the great and good, chin-strokers, beardy, woolly-jumpered, corduroy jacketed self-proclaimed authorities of every ilk, whose perch has however been requisitioned by the Da Vinci Code disciples, joining forces with the Warhammer war re-enactment brigade, remorseless and incorrigible in their Crusader or Roundhead and Cavalier costume, to outflank the tweedy, pipe-smoking lobby. But do try and concentrate on the architecture!

 

As I say, one of, what, only four medieval round churches (Cambridge and Northampton of particular interest). The story of the Knights - Templar and Hospital - is too tedious to bear repetition here – one sticks to the aesthetics as per the rule of this excursion – the cylindricality the least aspect of notice; it’s that rectangular add-on (the chancel) that has the most pristine, replete and essaying Gothic interior in London. A piece of Salisbury by the Thames with the first ever Purbeck shafts.

 

George Thalben-Ball was organist & choir director when Ernest Lough soprano sang Mendelssohn’s ‘Hear My Prayer’ (‘O For the Wings of a Dove’, aye lad) recorded for the Gramophone Company, 15th March, 1927 – a vintage month and year - one of the first ever million-selling albums. David Mellor (a man after my own art) – recommends the Chapel Royal of the Tower of London version; oddly, one of Lough’s sons subsequently joined the Chapel Royal. (Choir of the Chapels Royal, HM Tower of London, Colm Carey (Dir) Andrew Arthur (organ) - LIR Classics LIR026)

 

n.b. round churches were based on misapprehension that the Dome of the Rock was Herod’s Temple (and the Al-Aqsa mosque beside it, Solomon’s Temple)

 

We should mention the vast Temple Chambers, all along Temple Avenue – 1887, John Whichcord with its anonymous sculptures of ‘Atlantes’ – a recurrent figure in London, as if the whole sky were pressing down upon the metropolis (see also Atlas Assurance, Cheapside → 8.City 1, and London Coliseum, St. Martin’s Lane → 17.Covent Garden).

 

Leap oe’r the road:

 

Dominating are, naturally, the Law Courts, magnum opus of George Edmund (‘G.E.’) Street, a cluster or huddle of forms, withdrawing deferentially to make of the pavement a forecourt. Above, a row of aedicules invoke the scaffold (Bridge of Sighs) while, either side, helm-roofed octagonal turrets fall into line beside the all-engulfing porch. The insistent allusions - striped stonework, higgledy pigglediness of gable and turret, corbel and lucarne - elaborate an ecclesiastical rhetoric arcane and laden in mystique. Quite so. The medieval provenance is written in stone – a physical manifestation of claustral convention and routine, obeisance and rigmarole, deference to authority and precedent; an architectural endorsement of the wigs and buckled shoes, gartered hose, crimson and purple raiment, even - in the finicky details of tracery and moulding - winged collars, powdered wigs, gowns, laced jabots and ruffs. It’s High Victorian, drawing upon late C13th Gothic on the cusp of the Decorated: few buildings quite match it. 

 

Round the corner, a pair of contrasting aesthetics either side of Chancery Lane. The Law Society Library, an early Charles Holden before he changed gear for Frank Pick (see Box: 'London Underground Stations'). Tremendous flair: plenty of blank wall, complex niches, insistent keystones, channelled rustication, oeil de boeuf windows and, the main fair, a powerful Venetian over Diocletian assembly wrapped round both corners. This n.b. annexes the main Law Society premises by Lewis Vulliamy with its sober Ionic portico.

 

Facing on the opposite side, the former Public Record Office – 1851-66 James Pennethorne and 1891-6, John Taylor – now the Maughan Library of Kings College since the PRO moved to Kew [→ 28.West]. Rather mechanised Gothic , octagonal Perp domed towers and the repeated five-point Perp openings in golden limestone pure East Anglia (e.g. Melton Mowbray) - and prescient of the London Mosque (→ 22.Regents Park).

 

Alongside at 110 Fetter Lane by Woods Bagot, a large and rather pedestrian, if good-mannered blcok, dressed Portland mostly cut away into large-gauge rectangular openings. Houses the Chancery Division, Admiralty and Commercial Court and Technology & Construction Court.

 

MINSTER COURT is th esite of the LSE ‘s various cramped extrusions culminating in Towers One, Two and Three cheek by jowl with the similarly bland Thomas Moore Building and PO-MO add-on in orange birck an dcream Porltand stone called the Thomas Moore Law Courts which raises its 13 storey corner sufficiently to rear over St. Mary-le-Strand when viewed from the Hungerford Footbridge (East). Kylie’s rear in hot pants was the most memorable case here. Well, this all overlaps with (→ 17.Covent Garden) where the new Students Centre will be mentioned.

 

Lincoln’s Inn

The sequence of pleasant Oxbridge courtyards presenting a variety of buildings of which much the most distinguished, at least externally, must be the Stone Building, another exercise in commendable restraint (see also: Westminster School → 1.Victoria and Cabinet Office→ 3.Whitehall) this time by Philip Hardwick and what J&W enthuse as ‘one of the best examples’ of Palladianism, with pedimented ‘pavilions’ (porticos)[iv].

 

Land Registry Building, 32 Lincoln Inn Fields, of 1903, by the Office of Works, supervising architect Richard Allison – based on Robert Lyminge’s Jacobean Blickling Hall in Norfolk, an E-plan, i.e. projecting central bay and wings, with Dutch or ‘shaped’ gables. Revamp by Jestico & Whiles on behalf of LSE, 2010. A fine building hidden behind builders hoardings as I write.

 

Lindsey House 59-60 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 1640, possibly, not securely, Inigo Jones: elegance incarnadine, the first instance of a giant order with rusticated base, ballustraded parapet, dormers – the pink is stuccoed brick[ 

 

Visible from here across LINCOLN’S INN FIELDS, Sir John Soane’s Museum (but don’t go further as an avenue will connect us in time and place with our journey ahead[vi] ). Unique – one uses the term advisedly – mausoleum (less so) to collecting mania – up-market hoarding, OCD, Richard Wallace, Lord Elgin – acquisitional incontinence, albeit sophisticated and connoisseurial (Hogarth, Adam). But our quest is architecture. Peer through the clutter at the carefully articulated spaces, idiosyncratic, prima facie unrelated, distorted in convex mirrors under their trademark ceilings, tent-like vaults (influencing Giles Scott’s red telephone box). But the outside is best: plain unadorned arches, grooves devoid of moulding, ornament, and the undecorated round headed windows. Recall Tyringham Hall in Buckinghamshire: no clutter, untrammelled parkland.

 

At No.29 the ACCA Association of Chartered Certified Accountants have rather fine premises, including Egyptian oblelisks.

 

EGYPTIAN MOTIFS

 

Some examples:

 

→ 3.Whitehall (Curzon)

→ 4.Trafalgar Square (Nelson: relief 'Battle of the Nile')

→ 6.Holborn (here)

→ 8.City (Mansion House)

→ 9.East Docks (Isle of Dogs Pumping Station)

→ 11.Clerkenwell (Finsbury Bank for Savings)

→ 16.Bloomsbury (British Museum)

→ 20.Pall Mall / St. James (Egyptian Hall)

→ 24.Knightsbridge (Harrods when Al Fayed was owner)

 

The FIELDS itself a florid florigeum of sprouting plane of advanced age and bearing, bearing the hallmarks of antiquity one had hitherto asociated only with baobabs or the Major Oak. These vast swirling, vegetative forms (nine they say) crowd the space, turning into a forest what one might have expected to be a piece of well accounted and legalised baize. At centre, a commodious bandstand and all about patches of various exotic planting well worth a look.

 

The former Holy Trinity, Kingsway is also nearby but we’ll be there anon (→ 17.Covent Garden).

 

The next step is the Inns of Chancery, of which only this, the half-timbered Staple Inn remains, on closer inspection a row of houses, C16th, restored by Waterhouse. Now the Institute of Actuaries’ home. London’s only ..... Yes. Well. What the Americans would die for. Would knock the socks off York and Chester, Shrewsbury - Stratford, Warwick. This, with the loss The Bridge (pet project) the last remnant of ‘Ye olde worlde Londone towne’ – Liberty’s and The Globe notwithstanding. St. John’s Gate; Jewel Tower; Prince Henry’s Room; St. Helen’s; The Tower itself. And, beside this, Staple Inn Inner Court.

 

Barnards Inn / Gresham’s College C14th Hall with C16th linenfold panelling; torched in the Gordon Riots, restored by the Mercers. Gresham’s moved in 1991, having been around since occupying Thomas Gresham’s house in Bishopsgate.

 

back of here but we’ll come to in a moment (↓) Buchanan’s Distillery

 

We dive across the dual carriageway, as scampering rats:

 

Gray’s Inn The least satisfactory because open-ended of the colleges if we can call them that – due to war damage, this failure to close the quad is reminiscent of Downing Cambridge (why I never went there, John) or St. Kat’s at Oxford (not a proper idiom for a College anyway, as Thomas Tank would have said). A pity but the Hall is something else, another hammer-beam Middle Temple ....restored by Maufe with the Elizabethan screen said to be stolen from a Spanish galleon. 

 

We cannot I suppose end ‘Legal London’ without mention of Bow Street Magistrates Court (→ 5.The Strand) and the Old Bailey (→ 7.St. Pauls) built on the site of Newgate Prison. Both peek-at-able from here (the former £180 on the game board). Perhaps not entirely without relevance to the case (if we’re flying) we can give a subliminal mention, as it were, to The Supreme Court (→ 2.Westminster)