England: Plans to overhaul historic Inner Temple Library met with staunch opposition

Heritage experts and lawyers have expressed their opposition to plans approved last month to add a lecture theatre to the Inner Temple Library.

In a letter to The Times, signed by past and present architectural editors of Country Life, the experts said that the scheme will “destroy the proportions and much of the fine woodwork” of the library.

The letter adds that the library’s beauty “should be seen as a tribute to the sacrifice of war” and states: “The benchers of the Inner Temple should show more respect for what their forebears so recently achieved and heed the very strong opposition to their proposals.”

SAVE Britain’s Heritage objected to the plans earlier this year, saying they would “gut and drastically alter” the historic library in the City of London.

The Inner Temple Library is a series of double-height rooms, with upper galleries, oak panelling, pedimented doorways and brass candelabras, rebuilt in the 1950s.

The plans to add a lecture theatre will see the two-storey rooms of the Library truncated, with a new low ceiling inserted “destroying the symmetry of the spaces, and the high-quality woodwork” and wold see the fittings “stripped out, including the classical balustrades around the galleries”, the group said.

In March, Marcus Binney, executive president of SAVE said: “This handsome library beautifully panelled in oak, has a wealth of fine architectural detail. It is unbelievable that one of the historic Inns of Court should be proposing to butcher its own heritage in this brutal and insensitive fashion.”