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Tube: Holborn. North of the Law Courts lies Lincoln's Inn Fields , London's largest square, laid out in the early 1640s with Lincoln's Inn (Mon-Fri 9am-6pm; www.lincolnsinn.org.uk), the first - and in many ways the prettiest - of the Inns of Court on its east side. The Inn's fifteenth-century Old Hall is open by appointment only (tel 020/7405 1393), but you can view the early seventeenth-century chapel (Mon-Fri noon-2pm), with its unusual fan-vaulted open undercroft and, on the first floor, its late Gothic nave, hit by a Zeppelin in World War I and much restored since. The south side of Lincoln's Inn Fields is occupied by the gigantic Royal College of Surgeons ( www.rcseng.ac.uk), home to the Hunterian Museum (Mon-Fri 10am-5pm; free), a fascinating collection of pickled bits and bobs. Also on view are the skeletons of the Irish giant, O'Brien (1761-83), who was seven feet ten inches tall, and the Sicilian midget Caroline Crachami (1815-24), who was just one foot ten and a half inches when she died at the age of nine. To the southwest is one of London's few surviving timber-framed buildings, the seventeenth-century Old Curiosity Shop in Portsmouth Street, which claims to be the inspiration for Dickens' cloyingly sentimental tale of the same name. This seems unlikely, but it is certainly London's oldest shop building.
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