London: Sep 4: The Inns of Court and Vicinity

On Friday, September 4, 2010, a friend and former housemate of mine, J, came by for lunch and a tour of work. We then explored The Inns of Court, so called "legal London". The Inns are associations of lawyers (well, technically barristers) in London; each has a compound with offices, a restaurant, a library, etc. We visited the four Inns (Inner Temple, Middle Temple, Gray's inn, Lincoln's Inn); they're all in central London and all many centuries old. Because of the way they're designed, they feel secluded and quiet. We also looked at the streets nearby, and got reminded that the architect Christopher Wren did a lot.

Because I spent the time catching up with J, I didn't take many notes. J knows a lot of history and especially symbolism; she was a good person to explore a historic section of London with. She told me that British letterboxes are annotated with who was the monarch at the time. (Note: most of the things she told me were interesting, less-well-known facts than that; that fact isn't a good example of what I meant by my sentence about J's knowledge.)

I took a handful of pictures on this trip.