Temple station to Fleet Street

This is one of my very favourite short walks in central London. Turn left out of the station and bear sharp right at the top of the steps.
Turn immediately right again into Temple Gardens (after buying a Big Issue from the seller at the top). Walk through this incongruous tranche of urban countryside passing some interesting statues of long forgotten public servants until you get to the far gate where you will see the great philosopher John Stuart Mill (above) by the exit of the gardens (taken, incidentally with a Nokia 7650 camera phone, one of the first to come on to the market.)
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Cross the road leaving Viscount Astor's former London squat, 2 Temple Place (see below), on your left and walk through the gates into the Temple itself, a modern time-warp where the deceptive tranquility conceals the hurricane force of lawyers creaming off £500 an hour from apparently willing clients.Click for the big picture
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If anyone tries to stop you quote them Dickens (in Martin Chuzzlewit): "The Temple is a public thoroughfare; they might write up on the gate that it is not, but so long as the gates are left open it is, and will be". On your right are the gardens and on your left is Garden Court where Pip and Herbert Pocket spent so much of their time in Great Expectations. I vividly remember some years ago as I was walking to work one of these office windows on the left was suddenly thrown open to reveal an attorney who yelled: "Mrs Thatcher has resigned" before closing the window equally abruptly, like a cuckoo in a clock, once his historic role of telling the world had been fulfilled (or maybe his £500 an hour was being deducted).







Climb the next set of steps passing a pretty Robina (false accacia but nicer than the real thing) and Wisteria on your right. At the top of the steps wallow in a set of beautiful Mulberry trees set around a pool with a fountain (see left) mentioned frequently in Martin Chuzzlewit.
You won't believe this but a few years ago the Temple tried to get these trees - which in olden days provided silk for their like - demolished on the grounds that they "affected the area". They didn't even say whether they affected the area benignly or otherwise (Would you retain a barrister like that?)
I was one of a number of people who protested (even writing a poem about it) and they were subsequently reprieved.
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Turn right and walk under some very elegant plane trees passing on your right the entrance to the hammerbeam Middle Temple Hall where Elizabeth 1 watched the first performance of Twelth Night in 1603 in the presence of Himself (click on image for better picture).
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Cross the lane and walk into Inner Temple through the garden of the fig tree up some steps and into the square where the recently restored Templars Church, one of the oldest in London, stands in all its magnificence.
(Dan Brown's splendid holiday read The Da Vinci Code reaches here, shortly after page 400.)



If the door is open, go in and take in the haunting effigies of the Knights Templar on the stone floor.


Continue past the head of the Temple's house with a back garden that anyone in central London would kill for. Turn left through the end of the Temple to reach Fleet Street where the time warp ends. You can drop in at El Vinos if you need to bevvie your batteries.