The London Loaf: Temple Of Calm
Annalie Wilson continues her column The London Loaf: It always amazes me that I can still come across places in London that are new to me.
Asking around, I find I’m not the only one – with an embarrassed grimace friends inform me that they’ve never visited the National Theatre, the British Museum, Kew Gardens…and whilst thousands of tourists flock here year after year to visit these historical sites of wonder we Londoners can find it all too easy to forget.
I discovered a new joy last weekend, taking a bike ride through the old part of the City on a Sunday. In its deserted state you can almost imagine yourself transported back in time to the London of Samuel Johnson – you can even visit his house by following some handy signposts (presumably erected in case he got so drunk he couldn’t remember.) Relieved of the heaving masses of weekday workers the whole area has an air of calm that I hadn’t expected.
I had been rehearsing a script for the Sitcom Trials at the Leicester Square Theatre and as two of our actors had a day job in legal chambers they had managed to secure us a rather grand rehearsal location in one of the advocacy suites in Paper Buildings. Revisiting this venue on my leisurely weekend ramble I realised this to be part of Inner Temple – a name I recollected vaguely from certain passages in Dickens’ novels.
There is only one way in on a Sunday, which adds to the quietude, as well as making it feel cut off, secret, and a little enchanted with its own history. Built in 1184 as the living quarters for the Knights Templars, a religious order founded in the 12th century to protect the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, the Temple was leased to the students of common law in 1346 after the order was dissolved, and has remained thus ever since.
The emblem of the Templars is an image of two knights sharing a horse with a tattered flag – a symbol, I learned later, of their early poverty. There is something touching about the simplicity of these small figures, on top of a pole outside the Temple church – a reminder also in these times of financial insecurity, that wealth is not just for the individual.
Wandering west to the area known as Middle Temple I found myself in a large courtyard flanked by trees and a beautifully kept garden; here lies a fountain with a small plaque transcribed with a quotation from Martin Chuzzlewit, in which the fountain court becomes the setting for a love scene.
“Brilliantly the Temple Fountain sparkled in the sun, and laughingly its liquid music played, and merrily the idle drops of water danced and danced, and peeping out in sport among the trees, plunged lightly down to hide themselves, as little Ruth and her companion came towards it.”
In the novel, Dickens goes on:
“And why they came towards the Fountain at all is a mystery; for they had no business there. It was not in their way. It was quite out of their way.”
This was the part I liked the most. Because for once in this tumultuous city I had allowed myself to be led, without agenda, to a place which had no need or recollection of me, and my constructed self with its important identity – it just was, the way it had always been, and now for the moment I was a part of it.
www.innertemple.org.uk/
www.middletemple.org.uk/
www.annalie.co.uk/
Read more of The London Loaf.
Image of Inner Temple Garden by James Stringer.
