‘A pleasant academical retreat’

Fans of the curmudgeonly brief can pause at John Mortimer’s old chambers, No. 1 Dr Johnson’s Buildings, where the exteriors of Rumpole were shot. And it was at this address that the Scots barrister quoted above, James Boswell, arrived to meet England’s pre-eminent man of letters in April 1763. He found Johnson living ‘in literary state, very solemn and very slovenly’. After a second visit three weeks later he confessed to feeling ‘vain’ of the Doctor’s parting words. ‘He asked why I didn’t call oftener and I said I was afraid of being troublesome. He said I was not.’ These cagey exchanges mark the germination of a friendship that was to flower into the finest biography of the 18th century.

If you leave the Inn by Middle Temple Lane and turn left on to the Strand you pass Devereux Court. As early as 1665 a coffee-house known as ‘The Grecian’ was doing a brisk trade here. One fine morning in 1711 a pair of caffeine-addicts, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, drained their cappuccinos and agreed to found a new magazine, ‘to enliven wit with morality, and to temper morality with wit’. The Spectator.