HOLBORN BY ZOOX*

(pictured: the south elevation of the British Museum: the sculptures in the pediment represent 'the progress of civilisation')

If, after they start on London’s streets this September, you book an autonomous ‘Zoox, and say, 'Holborn', the chances are you'll be taken to the tube station, at Kingsway.

On this walk we're going to learn about robotic taxis, buses, and delivery vehicles, where they’re operating, and how they could change the public realm, in Holborn, the first local area to expand outside the City of London, now densely populated with pedestrians, lorries and bikes.

In the 1900’s, Holborn was the smallest of the Metropolitan Boroughs, but had a population density of 30K people per km2, twice that of the current most densely populated borough, Tower Hamlets.

Plus, as we walk the 2 km, clear across the diminutive borough, from Farringdon to Tottenham Court Road, we’ll see how London local administration started, before maps, from areas defined only by posts, based on churches (vestries, parishes and single-purpose district boards) to Metropolitan Boroughs, and today’s London Boroughs, an ongoing process of amalgamation leading to larger units, following a falling population, and sometimes leading to mismatched places.

For example, the location of ‘Holborn’, like the constantly-shifting magnetic North Pole, has wandered, as the area it administered grew, now over a mile west from the lower River Fleet, then known as ‘The Holbourn’, where it was first used.

After the Metropolitan Borough was created in 1900, its Town Hall, Offices, Post Office, Library and Swimming Pool were even further west, and not even in one of the several Holborn church-based parishes.

We’ll meet at Farringdon Station and start at the site of the Holbourn Bridge, a crossing the open ditch that flowed into the Thames 700m to the south.

The path of the ancient ‘Holbourn Hill’, which climbed the west side of the valley, is now occupied by the modern ‘Viaduct’.

Both arrived at the parish church of ‘St Andrew Holborn’, on this site since the 1200’s, rebuilt by Wren in 1690, his largest, gutted in WW2 and repaired in 1960.

For centuries, this local Church of England was the basis of local administration, which mostly consisted of regulating sanitation and hygiene, and the relief of the poor.

After Holborn Circus comes the street called ‘Holborn’, broad and still climbing, but only 250m long, bringing us to the old site of the Holborn ‘Bar’, the boundary of the City of London, at Gray’s Inn Road, still marked by 2 City Dragons, and the highest point in the City of London.

Then ‘High’ Holborn, sometimes described as ‘sterile’ and ‘a desert’, now lined with unoccupied office buildings, but showing glimpses on both sides of the swathe of lawyers’ precincts, which extend down to the Thames.

Our ‘Zoox’ drops us near Kingsway, then it, and we, calmly and safely, use the ‘Pedestrian Scramble’ (aka: ‘all-way’ or a ‘Barnes Dance’) crossing.

As we do, we leave the last vestige of the influence of the original parish of St Andrew.

From this point we are in Bloomsbury, and yet here is the original Borough Public Library (originally called 'St Giles') , later extended in 1908 to form a Town Hall for the new Metropolitan Borough, and the Oasis Sports Centre, opened as the ‘Bloomsbury Baths and Washhouses in 1852, and rebuilt and reopened in 1902 as the ‘Holborn Baths’.

London being a treasure storehouse, there are masterpieces we must see in passing:

· the hardly-ever-looked-at north elevation of Sir John Soane’s over-touristed House and Museum
· a surprise as it suddenly jumps out in narrow Great Russell Street, the south elevation of Robert Smirke’s 1842-7 British Museum: ‘the Erechtheion recreated’*. Still amazing that we have, right here in Holborn, an almost exact copy of a temple from the Acropolis.
· St George, Bloomsbury Way, (1716-31), ‘ the most grandiose of London’s 18th Century church fronts’**, and Hawksmoor’s last building, has a hidden-away tower which was originally the entrance.
· a ‘masterpiece’, but of planning policy: the Roof Garden of the Post Building, from which we may see all of Holborn***
· Central St Giles, by Renzo Piano, which surrounds an achingly minimal central space, whose purity seems to be a psychic remembrance of unspeakably awful, impenetrable ‘rookery’(=slum), which occupied the site until deliberately eliminated by new road schemes in the 1840’s.
· now edging, by ageing, into masterpiece status, Richard Seifert’s Centre Point, said to have been designed by one of his associates.

The walk will end at the world’s very first ‘Pizza Express’ at 10 Dean Street W1D 3RW.

* Amazon’s autonomous taxi brand. Launch date as currently expected. The taxi could also be an Uber ‘Wayve’, or an Alphabet ‘Waymo’.
**Summerson, ‘Georgian London’ & Pevsner, ‘The Buildings of England’, 1952-2002
***please bring photo ID for free admission to the Roof Garden by