I grant you that at first sight the Oxford Street and Holborn of to-day have a blatantly modern look. There is little to remind one in the kaleidoscopic vista of badly-dressed shop windows, gaudy buildings and dingy offices, that Roman soldiers once tramped along this very road. It took about a thousand years from the time that Agricola recalled his Roman legions from England for the discomfort of the Holborn mudholes to become unendurable, and for Henry V. to follow in 1417 the earlier example of his French confrère Philippe Auguste and cause the king’s highway to be paved at his expense. The paving does not seem to have been kept in good repair, for the garrulous Pepys says, 250 years later, that the king’s coach was overturned in Holborn.
Travellers along Holborn, at the other end of the social scale, shared in the royal benefit, for from 1196 to 1783 condemned criminals were brought in carts from Newgate Prison to Tyburn Tree. Everyone has heard of the famous gallows, but few people know that the exact spot where it stood is marked to-day by a triangular stone set in the roadway, almost opposite the beginning of the Edgware Road. A bronze plate on the railings of the Park, on the other side of the road, commemorates the fact, but if both stone and plate elude you, the friendly policeman who is always on duty here will point them out.
From the Marble Arch to Holborn there is nothing to look at but interminable shops till you come to the quaint old houses of Staple Inn, as disdainfully out of keeping with their vulgar surroundings as an orchid would be in an onion bed.
Staple Inn
“I went astray in Holborn through an arched entrance,
over which was Staple Inn.”—Hawthorne.
Staple Inn is one of the most delicious things in London. Out of the roar and hurry of Holborn you pass through the old Jacobean gateway with the façade of oaken beams into the tranquil old-world court where the noise suddenly dies away, and you can sit peacefully under the shade of the plane-trees, as far removed from the bustle and racket without the gate as if you had been suddenly transported a hundred miles on a magician’s carpet. From a kindly porter may be bought, for one shilling and sixpence, a delightful little history of this “fayrest Inne of Chancerie,” where Johnson lived after finishing his Rasselas in a week to pay for the expenses of his mother’s funeral.
When you are tired of sitting quietly in this “veriest home of peace,” go across the courtyard to the hall of the Inn and look at the carved oaken roof and the grotesque ornaments, at the Grinling Gibbons clock-case and the old stained glass windows, and before you leave Staple Inn go through the second court and look at the old sunk garden that is so unconcernedly green in the very heart of this big city. At the back of the Patent Offices that make the southern boundary of Staple Inn is Took’s Court—the Cook’s Court where Mr. Snagsby of Bleak House lived—once a place of those curious semi-prisons called sponging-houses that were like debtors’ boarding-houses with the bailiff for the landlord.
Staple Inn
Took’s Court is a sordid enough place now, and some of it may soon disappear, but it has a vicarious interest because Sheridan spent some of the last years of his life in a sponging-house here.