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Introduction, Part Two
The eighteenth century was an era of greater
stability, perhaps of genteel decline. Charles Lamb, who was born in
Crown Office Row in 1775, painted a loving picture of the Temple of his
youth in his essay 'The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple'. If he is to
be trusted, the late-Georgian benchers were a very singular body of
individuals. Sir Joseph Jekyll, Treasurer in 1816, similarly wrote of
his elderly fellows as 'fogrums' opposed to all modern fashions,
including new-fangled comforts. The decrepit state of some of the
benchers was matched by that of the gloomy alleys and decaying
buildings. Charles Dickens (Pickwick Papers, ch. 31) wrote of the
Temple's sequestered nooks, comprising for the most part 'low-roofed,
mouldy rooms, where innumerable rolls of parchment, which have been
perspiring in secret for the last century, send forth an agreeable
odour, which is mingled by day with the scent of the dry rot, and by
night with the various exhalations which arise from damp cloaks,
festering umbrellas, and the coarsest tallow candles'. Much of the Inner
Temple was rebuilt between 1830 and 1900, replacing Restoration elegance
and Dickensian quaintness with Victorian stolidity. The most successful
of the rebuilding projects, though it resulted in the demolition of the
little fourteenth-century hall, was the new Hall and Library, designed
in a perpendicular style by Sydney Smirke and opened by Princess Louise
in 1870.
Eminent Inner Templars from these centuries included a prime minister
(George Grenville), seven lord chancellors (Lords Harcourt,
Macclesfield, Talbot, King, Bathurst, Thurlow, and Chelmsford), Lord
Ellenborough, Chief Baron Pollock, Lord Bramwell, James Scarlett (later
Lord Abinger), Daines Barrington (author of Observations on the Ancient
Statutes), John Austin (the legal philosopher), Henry Hallam (the
constitutional historian), Sir Edward Hyde East (author of Pleas of the
Crown), Dr Lushington, and Sir James Stephen.
.
In the Inner Temple alone the air raids destroyed Fig Tree
Court (1666 and later),
four buildings in King's Bench Walk (1677 and later), Inner Temple
Cloisters (1681), Crown Office Row (1737, 1864), 2 Mitre Court Buildings
(1830), Harcourt Buildings (1833), the Hall and Library (1870), and
Tanfield Court (1881). They also destroyed the Master's House (1667),
and much of Temple Church, owned jointly with the Middle Temple.
The remains of Crown Office Row
Some of these buildings were restored after the war to their original
appearance, but the devastation also provided an opportunity to enlarge
some of the courts. The narrow Fig Tree Court disappeared, being
incorporated into Elm Court as part of the Middle Temple; and the
decision was taken to achieve a spacious Church Court by resiting Lamb
Building, which had stood in its centre. The vista from the Gardens,
between Harcourt Buildings and the Library, was completely redesigned in
a Georgian style (in red brick faced with stone) by Sir Edward Maufe and
Sir Hubert Worthington.
The vista from the gardens, between Harcourt Buildings and the Library.
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