Barnard's Inn (Dickens-era site), London

Step into Barnard’s Inn-once a legal hangout, later a literary dump, and now an intellectual hotspot. Originally belonging to Gray of Chancery and existing from around 1454, it was named for and owned by the Mackworth family. Later, a guy called Lionel Barnard lodged here for a while, and, somehow, the place got stuck with his name for over five centuries.

Being one of the Inns of Chancery in Holborn, it moonlighted as a backdrop for none other than Charles Dickens in Great Expectations. When young Pip hits the big, foggy city of London around 1820, this is where he lands-rooming with Herbert Pocket in what Dickens, never one to sugar-coat, described as “a club for Tom-cats” tucked in a "rank corner.”

And he didn't stop there. Dickens laid it on thick: Barnard’s Inn was, in his words, “a flat burying-ground” featuring “the most dismal trees, dismal sparrows, dismal cats, and dismal houses”-basically, the starter pack for Victorian gloom. Broken windows, sad little curtains, half-dead flower pots, and the ghost of Lionel Barnard apparently feeding off the misery of tenants too broke-or too cursed-to leave.

Despite that glowing review, the place itself is architecturally fascinating. There’s a hall with 18th-century chambers, 15th-century timber bays, 16th-century linen-fold paneling, and Greater London’s only surviving crown posts. These days, it’s home to Gresham College, where public lectures happen under those same gloomy rafters-but with a lot more PowerPoint and a lot less Dickensian despair.

So go ahead-poke around Barnard’s Inn. Just watch out for the cats.