London - Holborn and Clerkenwell Travel Guides | London | Sub Regions | London - Holborn and Clerkenwell

East of the West End and west of the City, Holborn falls between two stools, long colonized by lawyers, the press and intermediaries of all kinds. Twenty years ago though, the journos moved out east to Wapping and Docklands and the buzz of the latest news being churned on Fleet Street has died down. The district is now dominated by the atmosphere of the ancient Inns of Court, neat and officious places founded on discretion and legal traditions. That said, the quiet lawns, secret alleyways and collegiate architecture of the barristers’ stamping grounds are peaceful havens for outsiders to explore, and Lincoln’s Inn Fields houses two of the city’s most unusual museums, the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons and the spellbinding curiosity of the John Soane’s Museum. Over the same period Clerkenwell, on the other hand, northeast of the City and Holborn beyond the Gray’s Inn Road, has become one of the most vibrant and creative parts of London, the fashionable home of design consultancies, independent media groups and sassy restaurants. The old streets north of London’s main meat distribution centre at Smithfield Market are still a top place to paint the town red.

Sights

35-43 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, T 020-7869 6560.http://www.rcseng.ac.uk/services/museums M Holborn or Chancery Lane. now open Tuesday to Saturday from 10am to 5pm. Admission is free, but a donation of £2 per person is suggested. The museum is open to all.Group visits should be booked in advance. There is a free guided tour of the museum every Wednesday at 1pm.

On the south side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the largest square in London, is the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons. In the 18th century John Hunter amassed a huge collection of pathological specimens, human and animal, in the course of his lifetime as a surgeon, anatomist and teacher. With the addition of thousands more in the 19th century, the museum once held a world-beating variety of pickled parts and dissected exhibits. The Hunterian Museum has undergone a £3.2 million refurbishment to create a publicly accessible museum that encourages visitors to explore the scientific, cultural and historical importance of the museum collections.

12-14 Lincolon’s Inn Fields, T 020-7405 2107, http://www.soane.org. Tue-Sat 1000-1700, first Tue of month also 1800-2100 by candlelight in winter. Free. Guided tour on Sat at 1430, £3, concessions free. M Holborn or Chancery Lane.

On the opposite side of the square, Sir John Soane’s Museum is a remarkable memorial to the imagination of one of Georgian London’s greatest architects. Most famous for designing the Bank of England, Sir John Soane left his treasured project of a lifetime to the nation on his death in 1837. The eight or so rooms in No 13 that can now be seen are a purpose-built showcase for his highly idiosyncratic and eclectic collection of antiquities, artworks and objets d’art. At its most atmospheric (although often also most crowded) during the late openings on the first Tuesday of every month (candlelit in winter), an hour spent here is usually enough to persuade most people that they need to come again with more time.

17 Gough Sq, T 020-7353 3745. Apr-Oct Mon-Sat 1100-1730 (last admission 1715), Nov-Mar Mon-Sat 1100-1700 (last admission 1645). £4, concession £3. M Chancery Lane.

The home of one of Fleet Street’s most fearsome, productive and engaging characters. Sensibly the place does not attempt a full reconstruction of the chaotic squalor in which the awesome man of letters and his six amanuenses compiled his great dictionary, famous for its sense of humour. Recently refurbished, four floors have been decorated in a style appropriate to the period with displays on a variety of Johnsonia.

48 Doughty St, T 020-7405 2127. Mon-Sat 1000-1700, Sun 1100- 1700. £4, £3 concessions. M Russell Sq or Holborn.

Another literary shrine, this smart four-storey Georgian terraced house was where Dickens lived for two years while writing Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby, between 1837 and 1839. The interior has been reconstructed to look much as it might have done in his day, with much of his original furniture in the drawing room. On Wednesdays in June and July at 1930, The Sparkler of Albion is an entertaining two-hour theatre piece on the troubled writer’s life.

There’s an excellent value vegetarian café in the Mary Ward Centre (named after the best selling 19th-century novelist), Queen Square at the end of Great Ormond Street, a couple of hundred yards’ walk west from here.

M Farringdon or Barbican.

Clerkenwell is one of the more exciting parts of London to wander around, not simply because of the clutch of new shops, restaurants, clubs and bars that have opened up here in the last decade, but also because it’s an old part of town still visibly in a state of fashionable flux. A good place to start is in the south of the area around Smithfield Market, London’s meat distribution centre. Unlike the other wholesale fish and fruit and veg markets at Billingsgate and Covent Garden, the market has managed to cling on to its ancient site in the city centre. Especially late at night and at dawn, when the area round about is partying hard or fast asleep, the comings and goings of huge articulated and refrigerated lorries unloading endless fresh carcasses into its grand late 19th-century building can take on a surreal quality. Try a pint of Guinness and a fry-up breakfast in The Cock Tavern, T 020-7248 2918, at 0600 to complete the Smithfield experience.

Travel Guides | London | Sub Regions | London - Holborn and Clerkenwell
		Flights Cheap flights to any destination worldwide click here		Car Rental Compare prices for worldwide car rental click here		Hotels Lowest prices on over 60,000 hotels worldwide click here		Travel Insurance Compare Travel Insurance prices click here