Holborn · WC1 · long stay serviced apartments
Serviced apartments in Holborn · WC1
Holborn is legal London: seven centuries of courts, chambers and gatehouse Inns between the City and Covent Garden, with the largest public square in London for its local park.
Serviced apartments in Holborn
Why Holborn.
Holborn runs to a weekday clock, and that clock is part of its character. By nine the streets are full: the courts sitting, chambers at work, the lunch queue building on Leather Lane. By eight in the evening they have cleared, and the area settles into a quiet that central London has mostly lost. Lincoln's Inn and Gray's Inn sit behind their gatehouses like small college towns, and the people still out once the courts rise are the few who live here.
The company is the law and its neighbours: barristers and their clerks moving between chambers and the courts, solicitors from the firms around Chancery Lane, LSE academics and students crossing Lincoln's Inn Fields, silver dealers in the vaults below Chancery Lane, and a small settled handful of residents who have the streets to themselves by night.
The practical case is strong. Chancery Lane station is a four-minute walk; Farringdon, nine minutes away, has the Elizabeth line and Thameslink, which between them reach Heathrow, Gatwick and Luton without a change. The daily basket comes from the Sainsbury's Local on Fetter Lane, three minutes away; the full weekly shop is honestly a delivery, or the Waitrose at the Brunswick Centre, a twenty-minute walk. Lincoln's Inn Fields, the largest public square in London, serves as the local park, with tennis courts and the Pear Tree Café, and Leather Lane runs a street-food market every weekday lunchtime.
The lawyers are here because of a medieval eviction. Thirteenth-century royal proclamations barred the teaching of law inside the City walls, so the profession settled just outside them, and the guilds it formed became the Inns of Court: Lincoln's Inn's records run unbroken from 1422. The courts followed the lawyers in the end, when the Royal Courts of Justice opened on the Strand in 1882. The Great Fire of 1666 was stopped at the area's eastern edge, at Fetter Lane and Holborn Bridge, which is why Staple Inn's timber-framed front of 1585 still leans over High Holborn.
Holborn suits weekday London on foot: courts, chambers, Farringdon's two railways and the City all inside a fifteen-minute walk, and evenings that stay quiet. The trade-off is the weekend. Chambers empty on Friday evening, Leather Lane's market does not trade, the Silver Vaults close at Saturday lunchtime, and Lincoln's Inn locks its gates until Monday: Saturday is quiet, Sunday quieter. If you want shops and noise under the window seven days a week, Covent Garden next door will serve you better; for garden squares with Sunday life around them, Bloomsbury, one stop north, is the gentler fit.
Legal London,
between the City and the West End.
Holborn, in brief
Courts, chambers, Farringdon and the City within a fifteen-minute walk; quiet weekends
The boundary crosses High Holborn at Holborn Bars, marked by the silver-painted dragons on their granite obelisks
Most of the area carries one designation or the other
The largest public square in London: tennis courts, plane trees, a café
Street food and stalls, Monday to Friday lunchtimes only
Connectivity
- Covent Garden in about fifteen minutes, St Paul's about the same.
- Central line from Holborn or Chancery Lane, straight into the City.
- Piccadilly line from Holborn, to Covent Garden and the West End.
- Elizabeth line from Farringdon, Heathrow in 38 minutes.
- Thameslink from Farringdon or City Thameslink, Gatwick in about 40 minutes and King's Cross St Pancras in five.
What's in Holborn.
Chosen for residents rather than visitors: where dinner happens on a Tuesday, where the shopping actually comes from, and which doors are still open on a Sunday.
The Seven Stars
A pub of three small rooms behind the Royal Courts, trading since 1602, with a blackboard menu and a resident cat.
A few min walk · no reservations · open SundaysNoble Rot
Wine bar and dining room on Lamb's Conduit Street; the wine list is the point, the cooking keeps up.
About 15 min walk · book the restaurant · closed SundaysHolborn Dining Room
The Rosewood's grand brasserie on High Holborn, home of The Pie Room and a gin bar of some three hundred bottles.
About 10 min walk · open Sundays · book ahead at weekendsLincoln's Inn Fields
The largest public square in London, laid out in the 1630s on the condition it stayed open ground; tennis courts and the Pear Tree Café.
About 10 min walk · gates close at duskGray's Inn Walks
Nearly six acres of the Inn's private gardens, opened to the public on weekday lunchtimes.
A few min walk · 12–2.30pm, Monday to FridayInner Temple Garden
Three acres running down towards the Embankment, kept to a standard most parks are not.
About 10 min walk · weekdays 12.30–3pmSainsbury's Local, 60 Fetter Lane
The daily basket; the full weekly shop is a delivery or the Waitrose at the Brunswick Centre.
A few min walk · open SundaysLeather Lane Market
A hundred-odd stalls of street food, fruit and flowers serving the office lunch crowd.
A few min walk · Monday to Friday, roughly 10am–3pm · go before 12.30La Fromagerie, Lamb's Conduit Street
Cheesemonger and café with a walk-in cheese room; wine at retail price on Monday nights.
About 15 min walk · closed SundaysSir John Soane's Museum
The architect's house on Lincoln's Inn Fields, kept as he left it by Act of Parliament, sarcophagus in the basement.
About 10 min walk · free, Wednesday to Sunday · queues formLondon Silver Vaults
Silver dealers trading from the strongrooms of a Victorian safe deposit below Chancery Lane; entry is free and unhurried.
A few min walk · closed SundaysHunterian Museum
The Royal College of Surgeons' anatomical collection on the south side of Lincoln's Inn Fields.
About 10 min walk · free, Tuesday to SaturdayBegin your enquiry.
Tell us the dates and the shape of your stay in Holborn and a senior consultant will reply within one hour on weekdays, by the next morning on weekends. All correspondence is private and held in strict confidence.