Medical London walk

Red Lion square took its name from a medieval coaching inn which stood to the south. Like Lincoln’s Inn Square, it was originally a scruffy patch of land used for executions and rubbish tipping. In 1661, after the Restoration of King Charles II, the disinterred bodies of Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton and John Bradshaw lay here overnight, before being taken to the gallows at Tyburn and symbolically hung, drawn and quartered.

The square was developed in the 1680s by a surgeon called Nicholas Barbon, son of a famous Puritan MP nicknamed ‘Praisegod’ Barebones, who found that property speculation was a better way of getting rich than practising surgery. Barbon took a prominent role in the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire of 1666, and in 1681 was a member of the first company to offer fire insurance.

In the eighteenth century the square was the home of the clockmaker John Harrison and it was in a workshop here that he built the clocks and watches that won him the Longitude Prize. One of Harrison’s neighbours was the merchant Jonas Hanway – author of an essay against the new–fangled habit of tea–drinking, and reputedly the first man in London to carry an umbrella.

Though the square itself was first laid out in the seventeenth century, the most prominent features are statues of two twentieth–century figures; Fenner Brockway, the anti–war politician and one of the founders of War on Want, and Bertrand Russell, the philosopher and mathematician. The square is also known as the site of the Red Lion Square disorders in 1974, when anti–fascist protestors clashed with police, leaving one person dead. It is now home to the College of Emergency Medicine and Royal College of Anaesthetists.