LOSSES AND SURVIVALS

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 66, Issue 268, 24 August 1946, Page 2

LOSSES AND SURVIVALS

LONDON DURING THE WAR 'SPIRIT OF HISTORY I London meant much in the past week (or weeks) to millions of visitors. in all its variety, of climate as well as scene, it has stood for something beiinging to no other city in the world, says a writer in "The Times” during the victory celebrations.

How can this quality be defined? Other capitals are more beautiful. Other great towns are more orderly. Many a smaller metropolis expresses its dignity more consciously in groups of splendid buildings. But over the shapeless mass of London there broods incessantly the spirit of history. No sensitive mind can fail at times to be conscious of it. Such a time we have just passed through. And of that history in the years from 1939 to 194 G no man of our blood is ignorant. As we enter the narrow streets of the City from the west we open the door on the past. So short a time ago all the City was ablaze. Those flames lit up not alone the valour of a stalwart people: they revealed forgotten things out of a remote antiquity. And thus for all with eyes to see history has come to life. A walk almost anywhere in the City will show us parts of old buildings newly revealed, others cleared (as St. Paul’s) so completely in their surroundings as to be truly seen for the first time, others destroyed, and others noble fragments: where the sites alone remain they move us most of all.

Some of these pathways in the past of old London have already been traced in “The Times.” Here we may follow one about the western fringes of the City—part of that which Stow called .“the Suburbs without the Walls.” It stretches from Clerkenwell Green to the Embankment at the Temple Gardens, and includes the only medieval gateway left standing in London.

In Elizabethan times the building area beyond the 1 City embraced a double line of houses and gardens from Temple Bar to the village of Charing and Westminster: groups of houses, with many unoccupied spaces, between Holborn Bars and Fleet Street: “the west-by-north suburb without Newgate” (as Stow calls it); West Smithfield and Clerkenwell;. some cottages and gardens north of the Wall between Cripplegate and Moorgate, with the windmills df Finsbury Fields beyond; a double line of houses north of Bishopsgate as far as Shoreditch Church; and east of Aidgate “a large, street, replenished w}th buildings.” The Priory of Clerkenwell was the most northerly limit of the London of 15G0. Back To Tudor Times St. John’s Gate. Clerkenwell, takes us back beyond Tudor times, when the Priory was seized by the Crown. The gateway, built or rebuilt in 1501, spans the roadway of St. John’s Lane, and is now the headquarters of the Grand Priory in the British realm of the Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem and of the St. John Ambulance Association. The gateway has survived the war, though incendiary bombs fell on the roof and property close by was demolished. But the Priory Church of the Order, consecrated in 1135 by Heraclius, Patriarch of Jerusalem, has been levelled to the ground; its twelfth-century crypt and fifteenth-century walls alone remain. The Priory once extended to Clerkenwell Green. St. James’s Church, Clerkenwell, has survived substantially undamaged amid a. good deal of desolation. In the Inns of Court we are m the atmosphere of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Much mellow brickwork of the so-called Georgian period has perished here. Yet much remains. Gray’s Inn can fill us with despair or some better feeling.. Fo*. here the fine plane trees give dignity to desolation. Great rents appear in the line of buildings fronting Gray s Inn Road! and if we enter the Inn we find the hall and chapel destroyed but for part of the walls. The west side of Gray’s Inn Square has disappeared, and so has half of the east side. Field Court, with its fine group or houses, lias escaped. In South Square much of the east side has gone; the south side now has only the shells of Georgian buildings. Two houses alone are in use in this square, and in one case the ground floor only. The members’ garden makes us forget all. the vest—“the best gardens of any of the Inns of Court,” Lamb called them. Staple Inn met its fate in the last months of the war. The well-known timbered front in Holborn shows no sign of damage, but there is a sad tale behind. The little hall, built in 1581 and embellished with eighteenth-cen-tury “Gothick” features, is entirely demolished; and the charming garden behind exists no longer.

Blend of New and Old The blend of new and old in Lincoln’s Inn has been assisted by the trees and garden planted a century ago when the new hall was built. Damage to buildings was mostly confined to the windows of the Great Hall and to the fabric of the. eighteenth-century Stone Buildings (revealed as having only a stone facing.) Old Square and its Tudor brickwork have come through the war undamaged, and so has New Square, which was new in Dr. Johnson’s day.

In the Temple the shell of the Temple Church still tells its story. The piers of the later medieval building were supported on brick to prevent collapse, and in recent months the round Templar’s nave has been shored up on heavy steel girders until the shattered Purbeck columns can be replaced. The beautiful Transitional Norman entrance porch has escaped. Middle Temple Hall seemed at first as though it must be written off as a complete loss. Happily this is not the case.

Other gaps in the elder beauty of the Temple are sad enough—in Hart Court, Fountain Court, Middle Temple Lane, Tanfield Court, and King’s Bench Walk. From Fountain Court one now looks over the demolished Middle Temple Library to the river. Masses of broken masonry still lie about. Yet tlm beauty of summer has come to this as to other parts of London.