Red Lion Square

51°31′8″N 0°7′8″W / 51.51889°N 0.11889°W / 51.51889; -0.11889

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]