Lloyd Evans wanders round Inner Temple and discovers another world in the tangle of squares
Where’s the best place to eat lunch in London? First let’s strike restaurants off the list. At a restaurant your plate of recently throttled livestock will have been executed by a pimply sadist, cooked by a cursing psychopath and delivered to your table by a grudging PhD drop-out angling for a tip. So forget restaurants. Instead, choose outdoor refreshment and a bill of fare invented by the Romans and suitable for any time of day. A hunk of bread, a wedge of cheese and a flagon of Valpolicella. And for a picnicking spot you couldn’t do better than the lush shelving lawn of Inner Temple just off the Strand.
A young Scots barrister in the 18th century described its attractions with an outsider’s eye. ‘You quit all the hurry and bustle of the City in Fleet Street, and all at once you find yourself in a pleasant academical retreat. You see good, convenient buildings, handsome walks, venerable trees, you view the silver Thames.’
The only adjustment modernity has made to this description is the rumbling fume-stream of the Embankment which is shielded from the Inn by a sturdy wall and a row of carbon-quaffing, noise-muffling lime trees. These tranquil gardens are not the exclusive reserve of QCs and criminals. Ordinary folk are welcome, too, and if you choose to lunch there you’ll find history literally growing out of the ground. Beneath the turreted intricacies of Paper Buildings you’ll notice beds of red and white roses planted to commemorate the 15th-century grudge match between the houses of York and Lancaster which, according to legend, originated when the leading combatants stalked out of the Hall and chose their emblems from the gardens.
After lunch, if you can still walk, meander up the steps and make for the ancient Temple Church, which since its consecration in 1185 has been subjected to so many facelifts and roof-jobs that it reads like a living text-book of ecclesiastical restoration. It goes in cycles. Each century brings a new arbiter of taste who rips out his predecessor’s efforts and undertakes an overhaul which the following century denounces as vandalism.
Modelled on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the building is a rare example of the ‘Transitional’ style and has an unusual mixture of Romanesque and Gothic arches. Christopher Wren rebuilt the cloisters in the 1680s, and in the early 19th century Robert Smirke executed a refit that resulted in the ceilings being smothered in a psychedelic Opal Fruit effect which has been generously labelled ‘polychromatised vaulting’. The Luftwaffe delivered a fatal verdict on these floral blushes in May 1941, and the church was fully restored in the 1950s in a calmer, more muted palette that harmonises better with our notions of medieval austerity. Inside, head for the Round where you’ll see the effigies of martyred knights disposed, most curiously, on the ground rather then on plinths or raised platforms. Two have their knees turned sideways in a position so awkward that it must signify some distinction, possibly death during a crusade. No one knows for sure.
The church featured prominently in Dan Brown’s religious thriller The Da Vinci Code; if you’re lucky you may catch sight of the Revd Robin Griffith-Jones patiently talking to ‘Code-heads’ and attempting to supply factual answers to their weird questions. With his ghostly mane of white hair and his wizard-like title, the Master of the Temple, he draws excited gasps from these camera-popping pilgrims who regard him as a semi-divine apparition, somewhere between Gandalf and the Paraclete. What they fail to appreciate is that their queries about sacred whips and Jesuitical orgies are being addressed to a theologian of worldwide renown. If you go to Choral Matins on Sunday you’ll get the full flavour of Griffith-Jones’s sparkling intellect. For many church-goers his brief, brilliant, fact-crammed sermons are the highlight of the week.
Outside the church, walk in any direction and you’ll find yourself in a tangle of yards, courts and pretty fountained squares. Each teems with historic and literary connections. Pump Court was the residence of Henry Fielding, William Cowper and W.S. Gilbert. Oliver Goldsmith lived in Brick Court in the days when anyone with deep pockets and the right connections could find lodgings at the Inn. Goldsmith’s parties were so raucous that his downstairs neighbour Sir William Blackstone got sick of thumping on the ceiling and moved to new accommodation to complete his Commentaries on the Laws of England.
Besides the great and good, the Inner Temple has produced its share of scallywags and jailbirds. Their most famous law-breaker, Gandhi, was called to the Bar in 1891. He had difficulty ‘keeping terms’ (attending a minimum number of dinners as a condition of qualification) because the only English foodstuff he permitted himself to eat was boiled cabbage. Nevertheless, he claims to have been a big social hit at the dinners. ‘Two bottles of wine were allowed for each group of four and as I did not touch them I was ever in demand to form one of a quartet so that three might empty two bottles.’ After being sentenced to six years imprisonment in 1922 he was expelled from the Inn, and on his centenary in 1969 Lord Mountbatten proposed to the governing body of QCs that they should lift the ban. Because they could find no precedent for the posthumous readmission of a disbarred member they declined. After much debate, and an interval of 19 years, Gandhi’s expulsion was finally rescinded in 1988. That, as Rumpole would have said, is what lawyers call quick thinking.
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.
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