A LAW PALACE IN LINCOLN'S INN.
A SOLUTION of the Lincoln's Inn Fields question has been struck out, which has the merit of being sufficient to satisfy both " the two great parties in the state ' contending on that arena. The Bar is in favour of using the open space as a site whereon to build new Courts. Professor Owen, and the advocates of Metropolitan improvement generally, are strong in favour of supporting the "lung." The arguments in favour of transferring the Courts from Westminster to Lincoln's Inn are irresistible; but the claims on behalf of the lung are also strong. In London, however, it is a fixed principle that health is of less importance than convenience, and that both must give way to speed in the transaction of busi- ness. The lung, therefore, seems doomed, and already the Law Courts appear to have settled like tremendous tubercles on the breathing-space.
This sacrifice of the open field is less advisable since the space is surrounded on three sides by a very indifferent neighbourhood. Along the North, at the back of the houses lies " Whetstone's Park "—a mews illustrious in the annals of nosology for a raging form of epidemic glanders which once appeared in that narrow alley. On the West, lies a neighbourhood poor and dissolute, whose great thoroughfare is Drury Lane; and the same neighbour- hood makes a bend towards the South side, save where it is cut of by a burial-ground, where Joe Miller lies, but still persevering it severs the region of Lincoln's Inn from the Strand, rejoining Chancery Lane with its back lanes. Now, the whole of this dis- trict is marked by all the worst characteristics of the London slums, narrow and crooked alleys that forbid ventilation and invite accu- mulation of nuisances ; crowded with the poorest class of tenants, who are of course charged high rents ; and inhabited not only by human beings, but by constantly abiding fevers, rheumatisms, and the familiar epidemics which lodge wherever dirt, poverty, tripe- makers, and fat-boilers abide.
The preposition made by Mr. Waller Lewis to the General Board of Health is, that part of this overcrowded neighbourhood should be selected, and that the transfer of the Courts from West- minster to Lincoln's Inn should conduce to the improvement and not to the deterioration of the neighbourhood. This offers the means of reconciliation to both parties. It is scarcely possible that such an alteration could be effected without being self-sup- porting, by the improvement of the property in the neighbour- hood. It would also facilitate the much-desired improvement of the Strand in that part; and if any question arose respecting the poor who would be dislodged, a further improvement might also conduce to their welfare,—namely, the building of lodging-houses like those of which the pattern is set in Metropolitan Buildings, or in the Pancras model. The houses of the poor might be so built as not to disfigure the neighbourhood; and they might be so distributed as to facilitate the throwing open of more than one broad street cutting through to Holborn, and adding to the venti- lation already afforded by the broad square instead of obstructing it
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