28/04/2026
🥪 Lunch Break: Red Lion Square
📍2 minutes from Holborn station.
Tucked away between busy streets, lies one of London’s most history‑soaked squares.
📜 300 YEARS OF HISTORY
The square was laid out between 1698 and 1700 by Dr Nicholas Barbon, a ruthlessly ambitious developer. In 1684, his workmen fought a pitched battle with lawyers from Gray’s Inn armed with bricks who were determined to protect their “wholesome air”. Barbon won.
👑 THE CROMWELL GHOSTS
In 1661, after Charles II’s restoration, the bodies of Oliver Cromwell, John Bradshaw and Henry Ireton were exhumed and brought to the Red Lyon Inn overnight. Legend says they were buried here, with dummies substituted for the gallows. Their ghosts are still seen, walking diagonally across the square and vanishing at the centre.
👩🌾 F***Y WILKINSON GARDEN
In 1885, the square was laid out as a public garden by F***y Wilkinson the first professional woman landscape gardener in Britain. Her design of two circular grass plots and perimeter paths remains today.
🎨 PRE‑RAPHAELITE BIRTHPLACE
No.17 was home to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, then to William Morris and Edward Burne‑Jones (1856–59). Here, frustrated by the lack of suitable furniture, Morris designed his first pieces the birth of the Arts and Crafts movement.
⌛ JOHN HARRISON
At No.12 lived John Harrison, inventor of the marine chronometer the first accurate instrument to plot longitude at sea. His blue plaque is on the corner of Summit House.
🗽 MEMORIALS
- Statue of Fenner Brockway (1985) by Ian Walters
- Bust of Bertrand Russell, philosopher and pacifist
- Handkerchief tree planted for Lockerbie victims (1988)
📍 Southampton Row/Red Lion Street, Holborn, WC1
🚇 Holborn (2 mins)
🕒 Locked at dusk
📏 0.255 hectares
🏛️ Protected under the London Squares Preservation Act 1931
🔗 Find more historic squares on our map. Link in bio.
