Red Lion Square

Statue of Fenner Brockway at the west entrance of Red Lion Square
Flat on the southern side of the square in which William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones lived in the 1850s

Red Lion Square is a small square in Holborn, London.[1] The square was laid out in 1684 by Nicholas Barbon,[2] taking its name from the Red Lion Inn.[1] According to some sources, the bodies of three regicides—Oliver Cromwell, John Bradshaw and Henry Ireton—were placed in a pit on the site of the square.[3]

By 1720, it was a fashionable part of London: the eminent judge Sir Bernard Hale was a resident of Red Lion Square. The square was "beautified" pursuant to a 1737 Act of Parliament.[4] In the 1860s, on the other hand, it had clearly become decidedly unfashionable: the writer Anthony Trollope in his novel Orley Farm (1862) humorously reassures his readers that one of his characters is perfectly respectable, despite living in Red Lion Square. The Metropolitan Public Gardens Association's landscape gardener Fanny Wilkinson laid it out as a public garden in 1885, and, in 1894, the trustees of the square passed the freehold to the MPGA, which, in turn, passed it to the London County Council free of cost.[5]

  1. ^ a b Besant 2009, p. 26.
  2. ^ "UCL Bloomsbury Project". www.ucl.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 15 June 2024. Retrieved 21 March 2019.
  3. ^ British History Online Old and New London Volume 4, Edward Walford (1878) Archived 6 November 2014 at the Wayback Machine
  4. ^ "London Gardens Trust: Red Lion Square". Archived from the original on 15 June 2024. Retrieved 19 January 2021.
  5. ^ "London Gardens Trust: Red Lion Square". Archived from the original on 15 June 2024. Retrieved 19 January 2021.