The London Traveler

Not a lot of ancient London is left. You won’t find much in the City, of course, because the Great Fire of 1666 destroyed most of it – there are a couple of medieval churches left, but little else predates Sir Christopher Wren’s rebuilding. And in the West End, most of the older buildings have been replaced by more fashionable and up-to-date edifices.

If you want to see older buildings your best bet is to take a day trip; to Norwich for instance (less than two hours by train from Liverpool Street) or Cambridge (just over an hour from King’s Cross).

But London does have a few surprises. For instance the magnificent Staple Inn, on High Holborn. With its jettied-out top stories, and close studding, it’s a fine sixteenth century half-timber range, possessing seven gables along the street frontage. Inside is a lovely courtyard, and though the hall had to be rebuilt after a Second World War bomb scored a direct hit, it still looks much as it did in Queen Elizabeth’s day.

In the West End, St James’s Palace retains its splendid brick gateway, originally built as the entrance to a hunting lodge for Henry VIII. Brick was a fashionable material in Tudor times – it was expensive in the Middle Ages and used only for fireproofing chimneys – with small, thin bricks and typically wide mortar beds creating an interesting texture. (Of course the best Tudor brick is out at Hampton Court – but that’s a day trip out of the centre.)

There’s another fine Tudor gatehouse at Lambeth Palace, the London home of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Here too, polygonal towers flank the main entrance, giving it the feeling of a mini-castle. This gateway was built in 1485 by Cardinal John Morton, Archbishop of Canterbury under Henry VII. There’s some lovely decoration here, with darker, more burned brick forming a kind of diaper. And like St James’s, Lambeth Palace has battlements – decorative rather than functional by this date.

The Inns of Court have some of the nicest architecture from this period. Middle Temple Hall (not always open to the public) was begun in 1562, but is in its form a perfect medieval ‘great hall’ with a double hammerbeam roof. Here, the brick body is given a fine stone facing. As with the gateways with their battlements, you can see how Tudor and Elizabethan London continued medieval traditions of building – though if you get a chance to go inside the hall, you’ll see that the panelling also includes Renaissance motifs of a much more up-to-date style. Lincoln’s Inn has a slightly older Hall, built in 1490, and Gray’s Inn has a rbeautiful Elizabethan hall with a great hammerbeam roof which was set up in 1556. (The screen in this hall was always said to have been made of timbers from ships of the Armada, wrecked in 1588 – and when a part of the screen was being examined for repair in 1950, it was found that it was indeed of Spanish chestnut rather than English oak. So the old tradition just might be true.)

In Fleet Street, the gateway to the Inner Temple is one of the few remaining pieces of half-timber work in London – and a very fine piece of work it is. Buil around 1610. it has a jettied out wooden portion with fine oriel windows above a stone gateway. Inside is Prince Henry’s Room, a fine panelled room whose plaster ceiling carries the badge of the prince, the eldest son of James I. (Elder brother of Charles I, he might have made a better king.)

In Clerkenwell, St John’s Gate is a fine brick gatehouse with stone facing. A lot of what you see today is Victorian restoration, but the gate goes back to about 1500. Here was the Priory of St John of Jerusalem – the nearby Jerusalem Tavern takes it name from the long gone monastery.

Just past Smithfield is the Charterhouse, in a quiet iron-railinged square. This was originally a Carthusian monastery; it was closed in the Reformation, and its last prior, Houghton, was hung, drawn, and quartered, and his limbs nailed to the wooden door you can still see in the entrance. Later, the buildings were used as houses by Sir Edward North, the Duke of Norfolk (executed on Tower Green in 1572 for treason) and later Lord Howard of Effingham, admiral of the fleet against the Armada. Eventually it was sold to Thomas Sutton, who founded a hospital and school here. It is still an almshouse for elderly men of good character (the school has moved to Godalming).

What you’ll see from outside is a nice range of antique buildings in a fine square. But occasionally it is open for tours – which are well worth taking, to see the fine Elizabethan hall and chapel with a monument to Sir Thomas Sutton.

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