Holborn

The legal quarter: barristers' inns with their own gardens, a Tudor frontage on the main road, and the diamond trade next door.

Holborn is named after a river. The Fleet ran through a hollow here on its way to the Thames, and the name is old English for the brook in the hollow; the river is now a sewer under the road, but the dip in the ground is still there when you walk it. Its business has been the law for six hundred years. The Inns of Court are not colleges or firms but societies that train barristers and call them to the bar, and two of the four, Lincoln's Inn and Gray's Inn, are here, each a walled quarter of chambers, halls and gardens that you can walk into and almost nobody does. Staple Inn on High Holborn is the last of the smaller Inns of Chancery, and its overhanging Tudor front of 1585 is the best surviving stretch of the London that burned in 1666. Next to the lawyers is the diamond trade. Hatton Garden has been the centre of it since the nineteenth century, and the shopfronts still sell stones by the carat over the counter. The other reason to come is a house. Sir John Soane, the architect, filled his home on Lincoln's Inn Fields with antiquities, paintings and mirrors, and secured an Act of Parliament in 1833 leaving it to the nation on condition that nothing be moved. Nothing has been.