Post by Soutpeel on Jun 10, 2016 17:00:57 GMT 7
Tucked behind London’s Fleet Street, a patchwork of gardens and graceful buildings tell the story of the most famous knights of the Crusades.
It was rush hour on a weekday and I was weaving my way down the Strand, one of central London’s most famous thoroughfares. The street hummed with tourists, students and lawyers. Double-decker buses rattled. Cyclists sweated. Black cabs swerved.
Just east of the where the Strand turns into Fleet Street, beyond the 19th-century legal bookshop of Wildy and Sons, stood a small stone archway. Compared to the imposing structure above it – a timber-framed, Jacobean townhouse – it was almost unnoticeable. I turned in.
Here, on tiny Inner Temple Lane, was a hidden world, one that was lovely, leafy and serene, overlooked by graceful Gothic and Victorian buildings and patchworked with gardens and miniature courtyards.
The area, known as Temple, remains far less known to tourists than other nearby attractions like St Paul’s Cathedral or Trafalgar Square. And most of those who do find their way here don’t realise Temple’s biggest secret: this whole area was once the stronghold of the Knights Templar.
The medieval order, known for their role in the Crusades and as one of the Middle Ages’ most powerful and wealthy religious orders, lived, prayed and worked here from about 1185 up until their dissolution in 1312.
They built monastic dormitories, chambers and two dining halls – now known as Middle Temple Hall and Inner Temple Hall, though they’ve been rebuilt many times over the years – and, most famously, Temple Church.
www.bbc.com/travel/story/20160510-the-hidden-world-of-the-knights-templar
It was rush hour on a weekday and I was weaving my way down the Strand, one of central London’s most famous thoroughfares. The street hummed with tourists, students and lawyers. Double-decker buses rattled. Cyclists sweated. Black cabs swerved.
Just east of the where the Strand turns into Fleet Street, beyond the 19th-century legal bookshop of Wildy and Sons, stood a small stone archway. Compared to the imposing structure above it – a timber-framed, Jacobean townhouse – it was almost unnoticeable. I turned in.
Here, on tiny Inner Temple Lane, was a hidden world, one that was lovely, leafy and serene, overlooked by graceful Gothic and Victorian buildings and patchworked with gardens and miniature courtyards.
The area, known as Temple, remains far less known to tourists than other nearby attractions like St Paul’s Cathedral or Trafalgar Square. And most of those who do find their way here don’t realise Temple’s biggest secret: this whole area was once the stronghold of the Knights Templar.
The medieval order, known for their role in the Crusades and as one of the Middle Ages’ most powerful and wealthy religious orders, lived, prayed and worked here from about 1185 up until their dissolution in 1312.
They built monastic dormitories, chambers and two dining halls – now known as Middle Temple Hall and Inner Temple Hall, though they’ve been rebuilt many times over the years – and, most famously, Temple Church.
www.bbc.com/travel/story/20160510-the-hidden-world-of-the-knights-templar
