Holborn and Bloomsbury

The district to be treated in this volume includes a good many parishes—namely, St. Giles-in-the-Fields; St. George, Bloomsbury; St. George the Martyr; St Andrew, Holborn; Hatton Garden, Saffron Hill; besides the two famous Inns of Court, Lincoln's and Gray's, and the remaining buildings of several Inns of Chancery, now diverted from their former uses. Nearly all the district is included in the new Metropolitan Borough of Holborn, which itself differs but little from the Parliamentary borough known as the Holborn Division of Finsbury. Part of St. Andrew's parish lies outside both of these, and is within the Liberties of the City. The transition from Holborn borough to the City will be noted in crossing the boundary. As it is proposed to mention the parishes in passing through them, but not to describe their exact limitations in the body of the book, the boundaries of the parishes are given concisely for reference on p. 100.

Kingsway, the new street from the Strand to Holborn, cuts through the selected district. It begins in a crescent, with one end near St. Clement's Church, and the other near Wellington Street. From the site of the Olympic Theatre it runs north, crossing High Holborn at Little Queen Street, and continuing northward through Southampton Row. A skeleton outline of its course is given on p. 28. This street runs roughly north and south throughout the district selected, and dividing it east and west is the great highway, which begins as New Oxford Street, becomes High Holborn, and continues as Holborn and Holborn Viaduct.

The tradition that Holborn is so named after a brook—the Old Bourne—which rose on the hill, and flowed in an easterly direction into the Fleet River, cannot be sustained by any evidence or any indications of the bed of a former stream. Stow speaks positively as to the existence of this stream, which, he says, had in his time long been stopped up. Now, the old streams of London have left traces either in the lanes which once formed their bed, as Marylebone Lane and Gardener's Lane, Westminster, or their courses, having been accurately known, have been handed on from one generation to another. We may therefore dismiss the supposed stream of the "Old Bourne" as not proven. On the other hand, there have been found many springs and wells in various parts of Holborn, as under Furnival's Inn, which may have seemed to Stow proof enough of the tradition. The name of Holborn is probably derived from the bourne or brook in the "Hollow"—i.e., the Fleet River, across which this great roadway ran. The way is marked in Aggas's map of the sixteenth century as a country road between fields, though, strangely enough, it is recorded that it was paved in 1417, a very ancient date. Malcolm in 1803 calls it "an irregular long street, narrow and inconvenient, at the north end of Fleet Market, but winding from Shoe Lane up the hill westward."

Holborn Bars stood a little to the west of Brooke Street, and close by was Middle Row, an island of houses opposite the end of Gray's Inn Road, which formed a great impediment to the traffic. The Bars were the entrance to the City, and here a toll of a penny or twopence was exacted from non-freemen who entered the City with carts or coaches.

The George and Blue Boar stood on the south side of Holborn, opposite Red Lion Street, and it is said that it was here that Charles I.'s letter disclosing his intention to destroy Cromwell and Ireton was intercepted by the latter; but this is very doubtful.