Visit Reports
London Legal Walk and visit to the Courtauld Gallery June 4th 2014
London Legal Walk
The "Legal London Walk" led by Blue Badge Guides, started with a visit to Lincolns Inn Fields, the site of various brutal
hangings and other gruesome state-ordered deaths, thankfully none too recently! The tranquil Central London scene belied
its morbid past. Our guide explained the differences between the two main sections of the legal profession - Barristers and
Solicitors - the work they do and the courts they can appear in. Next stop was one of the four Inns of Court, Grays Inn,
once a place of residence for those training to be Barristers but now almost entirely sets of chambers from which Barristers
practice the law. Again, a peaceful haven in the midst of Central London.
At Staples Inn, not one of the four Inns of Court, we learned the origin of the expression "one for the road", which is when
prisoners en route from Newgate prison to Tyburn (near current day Marble Arch) stopped en route and were allowed one last drink
before continuing to meet their maker. Their jailers, meanwhile, remained "on the wagon" whilst the prisoners drank.
We continued to Lincolns Inn with its beautiful buildings, gardens and manicured lawns before moving on to the Royal Courts of Justice,
built in the 1870s in the Victorian gothic style by George Edmund Street, a frustrated ecclesiastical architect.
Last stop was The Temple, Inner and Middle, which share the same site - put firmly on the tourist map as a result of the filming of The Da Vinci Code in Temple Church.
The Courtauld Gallery
After lunch in one of the many places to eat in the area we went to the Courtauld Gallery. Our HEDFAS monthly May lecture was by
Nicholas Watkins on Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings hence our visit to the Cortauld Gallery which houses one of the
finest collections of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings in the world.
All the paintings were acquired by the pioneering collector Samuel Courtauld; the collection offers an array of outstanding
works charting the development of modern French painting from Monet and Renoir to Seurat and Gauguin.
Many of us gazed at the lady at "A Bar at the Folies Bergère", painted by Édouard Manet. The barmaid seems detached in her own
world - what is she thinking? why is her reflection in the mirror inaccurate; why include the legs of the trapeze artist top left?
We owe so much to the pioneering collector Samuel Courtauld which has resulted in the large collection of priceless paintings and
silver. No doubt we were drawn to different ones but many of us said - "I should come here more often".
Richard Burn and Cynthia Hayhurst (Photographs by Richard Burn, Manet copyright of the Courtauld Gallery) June 2014