Welcome to London x London’s Holborn Guide: your guide to the best bars, restaurants and things to do in this Central London neighbourhood.
Holborn falls within the London Borough of Camden, bordering the City of London to the east and Covent Garden to the south, with Holborn tube station serving as its hub.
Wedged between the City and Bloomsbury, Holborn hides some of London’s oldest institutions behind unassuming Victorian facades.
Two of the four ancient Inns of Court, a river running invisibly beneath the pavements, and pubs that have barely changed in a century, Holborn rewards anyone who stops to look properly.
Holborn takes its name from a ‘hole-bourne’, a stream in a hollow that once ran to the Thames. That stream still exists: it’s the River Fleet, one of the largest of London’s lost rivers, running entirely underground beneath the area today.
The neighbourhood spent 65 years as its own Metropolitan borough before merging into Camden in 1965, but its identity as London’s legal heartland runs much deeper than that. Gray’s Inn and Lincoln’s Inn, two of the four Inns of Court, have trained and housed barristers here since the 14th century and remain working legal societies today.
London's legal heartland, historic and quietly atmospheric
