Best Restaurants, Bars and Things to Do in Holborn, London

About Holborn

Holborn is not a neighbourhood that announces itself as a food destination, but that is partly what makes it interesting. Sitting between the City and the West End, it catches the spillover from both — serious lunch restaurants serving the legal district, historic pubs in lanes that have not changed significantly in a century, and a market street that feeds the same lunchtime crowd it has been feeding for decades.

Leather Lane Market, which runs parallel to Gray's Inn Road, is one of the better street food markets in central London on a weekday lunchtime and has a democratic, working quality that is absent from the more curated market experiences elsewhere in the city. The Inns of Court — Lincoln's Inn, Gray's Inn, the Middle Temple and the Inner Temple — contain some of the most remarkable outdoor spaces in central London, and eating near them gives the surrounding streets a particular atmosphere that is unique to this part of the city.

Lets Discover creators who cover Holborn know the neighbourhood across its registers, from the best grab-and-go lunch on Leather Lane to the restaurant tucked into a converted building on one of the lanes off Chancery Lane that has been feeding the legal profession for thirty years.

High Holborn provides the main commercial spine, with restaurants ranging from well-established group operations to the occasional independent that has survived in the area for years. Leather Lane Market is the neighbourhood's most distinctive food destination — a street market running from Clerkenwell Road down to Holborn Circus with permanent traders and street food stalls that are busiest between midday and two in the afternoon on weekdays. Chancery Lane and the streets running off it toward the Inns of Court have a cluster of sandwich bars, cafes and more formal lunch restaurants that serve the legal profession. The Strand, forming the southern boundary of the neighbourhood, has its own cluster of restaurants around the Aldwych junction and the area toward Covent Garden. Bleeding Heart Yard, a hidden courtyard off Greville Street, houses one of the neighbourhood's best restaurants in a setting that genuinely feels like another century.

History and culture in Holborn

Holborn's history is inseparable from the development of English common law, which has been practised in the Inns of Court here since the 14th century. Lincoln's Inn, the oldest of the four Inns of Court, has records of legal practice dating to 1422, and the surrounding district grew up to serve the lawyers, barristers and clerks who worked in the legal system. The area around Hatton Garden, on the northern edge of the neighbourhood, has been the centre of London's diamond and jewellery trade since the 16th century, when the Bishop of Ely's townhouse garden became one of the most desirable addresses in the city. Leather Lane has functioned as a market street since at least the 17th century. The Holborn Viaduct, built in 1869 to cross the valley of the River Fleet, was one of the first flyover roads in the world and its Victorian Gothic ironwork remains one of the more distinctive pieces of street architecture in central London. The River Fleet, London's largest underground river, still flows beneath Farringdon Road at the eastern edge of the neighbourhood.