Metropolitan Borough of Holborn

The borough was formed in 1900 from seven civil parishes and extra-parochial places; all but the first of these were historically part of Holborn:

• St Giles in the Fields and St George Bloomsbury
• St Andrew Holborn Above the Bars with St George the Martyr
• Liberty of Saffron Hill
• Furnival's Inn (part)
• Gray's Inn
• Lincoln's Inn
• Staple Inn

In 1930 these seven were combined into a single civil parish called Holborn, which was conterminous with the metropolitan borough.[1]

Previous to the borough's formation it had been administered by two separate local bodies: Holborn District Board of Works and St Giles District Board of Works. The Inns of Court and Inns of Chancery had not been under the control of any local authority prior to 1900.

St Giles, St George (patron saint of Bloomsbury) and St Andrew (patron saint of Holborn) were depicted on the borough seal. The several constituent parishes were illustrated in the arms granted to Holborn in 1906, while the supporters, the Lion and the Griffin are from the arms of Lincoln's Inn and Gray's Inn (Inns of Court).

Charges from these arms were used, together with charges from the coats of arms of Hampstead and of St. Pancras, when the new coat of arms of the London Borough of Camden was designed in 1965.

Several of the street name signs in the British Museum/Senate House area still bear the "Borough of Holborn" area designation. Holborn Town Hall, built in 1894, still exists, on High Holborn, and still has the coat of arms in the façade.[2]

Holborn was the smallest of the twenty-eight metropolitan boroughs of the County of London, with an area of between 405 and 407 acres (1.6 km²). Therefore, it was even smaller than the City of London. It also had the smallest population of any of the boroughs throughout its existence. The populations recorded in National Censuses were:

Constituent parishes 1801–1899

Metropolitan Borough 1900-1961

A map showing the wards of Holborn Metropolitan Borough as they appeared in 1952.

The borough was divided into nine wards for elections: Central St Giles, Lincoln's Inn, North Bloomsbury, North St Andrew, North St Giles, Saffron Hill, South Bloomsbury, South East St Andrew and St George the Martyr.[6][7]

• 
  Borough seal
• 
  Town Hall frontage

• London Government Act 1899
• Metropolis Management Act 1855
• Bourne Estate

• Robert Donald, ed. (1907). "London: Holborn". Municipal Year Book of the United Kingdom for 1907. London: Edward Lloyd.

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