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Order in the court! Holborn, strategically located between the City of London and the West End, is home to the citys legal trade. Holborn houses age-old legal centres called the Inns of Court; institutions where barristers train and traditionally pratice. According to ancient custom, anyone training to be a barrister must join one of the Inns of Court, dine there 24 times and pass exams before they are qualified. The main street, also named Holborn, borders the London Borough of Camden, the City of Westminster and the City of London and the district is just north of Fleet Street, the traditional ´turf´ for journalists.
Several magnificent buildings in Holborn survived the Great Fire of 1666 and Holborn´s spirit is centred around four of the most beautiful - the four Inns of Court: Lincoln´s Inn, Gray´s Inn, Middle Temple and Inner Temple.
Inner Temple, located on Kings Bench Walk, and Middle Temple, on Middle Temple Lane, are built around a maze of courtyards and passageways and are beautiful to discover at night as the grounds are still lit by gas laterns. Gray´s Inn, on Gray´s Inn Road, was the last Inn to be founded in 1569. It´s garden, now a great place to relax in, was once used for staging duals and Shakespeare´s play ´A Comedy of Errors´ was first performed in 1594 in Gray´s Inn Hall. Lincoln's Inn is located next to Lincoln's Inn Fields, the largest residential square in London, and is the most beautiful and least changed of the Inns. Lincoln Inn's Fields were once the place of public executions.
Do yourself a favour by taking a stroll around and within the Inns of Court. They're quiet, peaceful and it's like jumping into a history book with medieval buildings and lawyers in their traditional attire.
However, Holborn's most famous landmark is the Old Bailey, London's Central Criminal Court. This is where Britain's most serious criminal cases are heard and, before it was demolished in 1902, was also the site of Newgate Prison, where those found guilty would be publicly beheaded or hanged in the street. If you want, you can sit in the visitors´ gallery to view the daily legal proceedings and absorb the history as judges and lawyers enter the court rooms wearing traditional wigs and clothing and carrying posies. The posies, now only a ritual, were needed to disguise the smell of decaying corpses in the days of Newgate Prison.
Other places of interest in the area are; the Gilbert Collection in Somerset House, Leather Lane Market, Hatton Garden, the centre of London's diamond & jewellery trade and Sir John Soane´s Museum.
In the 18th century, Holborn was home to Mother Clap's molly house, one of the homosexual brothels in the area for men. Homosexuality was a crime punishable by execution and molly houses provided a safe haven for businessmen seeking homosexual encounters. The site of this molly house was destroyed by the construction of the Holborn Viaduct - a bridge linking Holborn to Newgate Street.
Holborn is accessed by Holborn underground station, which is the junction of the Piccadilly and Central lines, and also by Chancery Lane, Covent Garden, Temple and St. Paul's tube stations.
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