Gray's Inn Road

Gray's Inn Road, formerly Gray's Inn Lane, also spelt without the apostrophe, is a major road in central London, in the London Borough of Camden. It is named after Gray's Inn, one of the four Inns of Court. The road starts in Holborn, near Chancery Lane tube station and the boundaries of the City of London and the London Borough of Islington. From here it goes north and slightly west, forming the boundary between Clerkenwell to the east and Holborn, Bloomsbury and finally St Pancras to the west.

Along its course the road passes the Eastman Dental Hospital and the UCL Eastman Dental Institute, Gray's Inn, ITN, ITV and the London Welsh Centre. Near the north end of the road, where it meets Cromer Street and Acton Street, it turns into a one-way system heading towards Kings Cross station.

Throughout its route the road keeps to the higher ground, above the valley of the River Fleet to the east. In earlier times it was the principal route from London to Hampstead.

The area of Gray's Inn Road was clearly populated from palaeolithic times and a gravel bed off Gray's Inn Lane (see below) was the find spot for the c. 350,000-year-old Gray's Inn Lane Hand Axe in 1679, one of the important artefacts in the emerging consciousness of human antiquity, now in the British Museum. Given the road's height above the Fleet valley, it may have formed part of an ancient trackway.

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