Walking the Circle Line: Blackfriars to Temple
I am a third of the way through walking London Underground’s 14-mile long Circle Line. Trying to stay as directly above the line as I can manage, along the way I’ve been taking large format photographs with a primitive pinhole camera.
Previous installments: Barbican to Moorgate, Moorgate to Tower Hill, Tower Hill to Blackfriars.
This installment leads me from BlackFriars to Temple. Blackfriars was named after the Dominican Friars who arrived on the site around 1200AD, while the Temple is named after the Knights Templar of the 1100s.
Above, Hare court inside the Inner Temple area of London. (note for irregular readers: I like triangular compositions)
This section of the Circle Line is one of the most mysterious. A large number of Londoners, maybe even most of them, do not realise the area known as Temple even exists. Larger than Trafalgar Square and Leicester square put together, Temple is a large complex of buildings with the Temple Church at its centre. The Church shown above was founded by the Knights Templar in 1185 around the time of the Crusades. There is far too much history around this for me to cover here, unfortunately, but the area is something every Londoner should visit.
Work yourself inside the church and you’ll find effigies of Knights from the 1200’s. The inside itself was refurbished by Christopher Wren after the great fire of London of 1666.
There are only a few small and nondescript entrances to Temple, and despite walking past them hundreds of times I had never ventured inside. Perhaps this had something to do with the sign ‘Open to Inner Temple members only’ that you see from the Thames entrance. Above, you can see a garden as fine as any in London. If you manage to make your way inside, you might be as lucky as I was and have it all to yourself. The incredible fact is that several feet directly underneath this fountain trains full of hundreds of people rattle past every 2-3 minutes year round (myself included) and the commuters are largely unaware. As if that is not enough, this very garden is where the ‘War of the Roses’ was alleged to have started, Shakespeare describing the event in Henry VI with the plucking of a rose in Temple Garden.
The Knights Templar didn’t hold on to the area for long, as early as the 1300’s it was leased to the lawyers and barristers of London. To this day it is home to the leading Queens Counsels of the UK, most buildings still house the lawyers of London. Above is Middle Temple dating from Elizabethan times and known to be where some of Shakespeare’s plays were first held.
