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A political history of Britain in the places where it happened: parliament and palace, courts and counting houses, and the streets where people pushed back.
Bacon's garden, Shakespeare's first Comedy of Errors, and a hall rebuilt after one night of the Blitz.
Law & justice
There are four Inns of Court in London - Lincoln's Inn, Gray's Inn, the Inner Temple and the Middle Temple - and between them they hold the exclusive right to Call a student to the Bar, which is the ceremony that makes a barrister. They grew out of the medieval lodgings where lawyers lived, ate and taught within walking distance of the royal courts at Westminster. None of the four claims to be older than the others. They are landlords, libraries and dining societies rather than universities, and they have never stopped being any of those things.
Gray's Inn takes its name from Reginald de Grey, whose London house it was; lawyers have been on this ground since at least 1370. Its hall of the 1550s is where Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors is believed to have had its first performance, at the Christmas revels of 1594. Francis Bacon, a member of the Inn for most of his life and its Treasurer, laid out the gardens behind it in 1608 and built himself a summerhouse on a mount there with a gilt griffin on the roof. The gardens are still called the Walks and are among the largest private gardens in London; Pepys came to be seen in them, and the wrought-iron gates from Field Court, put up by a Treasurer in 1723, still carry his initials. In 1941 the Blitz took the hall, the chapel and the library in a night, and Edward Maufe's rebuilding was not finished until 1960. The office in Raymond Buildings where a young Charles Dickens worked as a clerk is on the same walk.
| Monday | 12:00 – 14:30 |
|---|---|
| Tuesday | 12:00 – 14:30 |
| Wednesday | 12:00 – 14:30 |
| Thursday | 12:00 – 14:30 |
| Friday | 12:00 – 14:30 |
| Saturday | Closed |
| Sunday | Closed |
Hours from the page that lists them, checked 7 September 2026.
The hours are the Walks, the Inn's garden, which is what the public may see. The squares are open on weekdays; the hall and chapel are not.
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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.