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T The Grand Re-Opening
THE GRAND RE-OPENING
After a mammoth effort to complete reinstatement of the Treasury Building, the Inn was relieved and delighted to celebrate the official re-opening on Wednesday 4 May in the presence of the Inn’s Royal Bencher, Master Her Royal Highness The Princess Royal. The evening began with a rousing service of Choral Evensong officiated by the Master of the Temple. Undeterred by a sudden change in the weather, Her Royal Highness, accompanied by the Treasurer and Reader, was able to enjoy the full impact of walking from the Temple Church into the new main entrance of the Treasury Building. While visiting the Library, Her Royal Highness met Master Sally Smith, Chair of the Library Committee and Robert Hodgson, Librarian and Keeper of Manuscripts, as well as Library staff and the Archivist. In this centenary year of the first women to be called to the Bar of England and Wales, Her Royal Highness graciously agreed to be photographed with past female Treasurers. After meeting Master Juliet May, Chair of the Education and Training Committee, Struan Campbell, Director of Education, and The Princess Royal Scholars, Her Royal Highness was accompanied by 2020/2021 Treasurer, Master Guy Fetherstonhaugh, to view some of the training rooms and then to meet members of the Project team, including Richard Snowdon, Director of Properties, Hugh Broughton and Adam Knight of Hugh Broughton Architects. Having also met past Treasurers, members of the Finance Committee and Chairs of Advocacy Training, Qualifying Sessions and Student Engagement Committees, Her Royal Highness was accompanied by the Treasurer into the Hall for the speeches, published below.
The Treasurer and Master HRH The Princess Royal with past female Treasurers; Master Heather Hallett, Master Elizabeth Butler-Sloss and Master Elizabeth Gloster
HRH meeting Vicky Portinari and Henrietta Amodio
Good evening, and a very warm welcome to all of you here tonight – to our Benchers and members involved in the Inn’s governing committees, student society representatives, Princess Royal Scholars, our staff, our close partners and those who have played key roles in delivering Project Pegasus.
It has been my pleasure to show Your Royal Highness around our refurbished and redeveloped building today. We are extremely grateful that, as our Royal Bencher, Your Royal Highness shows a continuing and keen interest in The Inner Temple, not least in our triennial legal book prize. Your Royal Highness has also kindly agreed to be Patron of the Friends of Temple Church. We enjoyed a beautiful Evensong there this evening and look forward to the Church’s own Restoration and Renewal Project taking shape in the coming years.
We are delighted that Your Royal Highness can be here today to reopen our Treasury Building officially. Project Pegasus has been challenging to implement but the satisfying results we see today entirely justify the vision and investment of the Inn. It was our duty to undertake this work to enable us to look forward and meet the increasing needs and demand for better teaching facilities and improved technologies to deliver new teaching strategies for the future. The Royal Charter of 1608, reaffirmed by HM The Queen in 2008, places important responsibilities on us to provide for the accommodation and education of students and barristers. The redevelopment of the building will meet those needs, and in addition afford us great benefits and opportunities in terms of revenue to fund these central purposes.
Project Pegasus has been challenging to implement but the satisfying results we see today entirely justify the vision and investment of the Inn.
HRH meeting past Treasurers
Our period of closure has also enabled us to make many other associated improvements to our buildings, including improved audio-visual facilities throughout the building and better acoustics here in the Hall, a much-needed makeover of the Pegasus Bar, better storage facilities for our silver, and imaginative rehanging of our paintings. We now have greatly improved kitchens, from which we are all benefitting tonight.
This year, 2022, marks the centenary of the first women being called to the Bar of England and Wales. We will be marking this important 100-year milestone more specifically later this month. I am delighted that The Inner Temple and our nearest neighbour Middle Temple both have women Treasurers in office this year. Your Royal Highness was our Royal Treasurer in 2011 and we are delighted to have all three previous women Treasurers here tonight. After the rehang of the pictures, the first portrait we now see on entering this building is that of our first female Treasurer, Master Butler-Sloss and, as we have seen this evening, the portrait of Your Royal Highness is at the entrance to our new third floor Education and Training Suite.
Today our focus is on our transformed Treasury Building and the contribution it will make to future generations of barristers. It is with very great pleasure that I call on Your Royal Highness to declare the building open again.
Her Honour Judge Deborah Taylor
Master Treasurer
THE GRAND RE-OPENING: SPEECH BY MASTER HRH THE PRINCESS ROYAL
Master HRH The Princess Royal meeting Struan Campbell and Master Juliet May
Thank you, Master Treasurer for your very kind words of welcome, and the invitation to join you this evening on this rather important moment. And all of you I’m sure have been hugely involved in getting everything ready for today. I think the hoovering went on quite late.
This is a real treat to be truly opening a new build, a new project. I have to say I have probably been Royal Bencher of The Inner Temple for slightly longer than I had remembered. So, I’ve seen a few changes, but of course this – Project Pegasus – is something else. It truly is the biggest development since the 1950s. And it’s a very significant event to be able to reopen it completed and ready for action.
Nice too, because you can all come here again after three years. Now that probably sounded like an inconvenience and an irritation three years ago. In retrospect, not quite so bad given that you wouldn’t have been allowed in any way for two years. And in terms of time, a mere hiccup in a 700-year history of the Inn. Sure, we can put up with that.
Well, of course, I was last here in 2019, which was at the very start, and that was the dinner – the joint Amity Dinner between The Inner and Middle Temples. My grandparents, of course, attended the original dinner not long after the devastation of World War Two. So that rebuilding – very much in mind at that moment, and another rebuild now, building on that extensive redevelopment, refurbishment – and probably finding some of the things which weren’t done quite that brilliantly back in the 50s, so not a bad time to do so. And the redesign by Hugh Broughton Architects is a really clever plan. It’s a development of Sir Hubert Worthington’s post-war incomplete designs and has really enhanced the Inn’s integral collegiate spaces. I hope you all have seen that for yourselves now.
What we also forget, fortunately, with the passage of time, is probably how many years that it has taken of meticulous planning to get Project Pegasus to this point. To see that project come to fruition, I hope will have been enormously satisfying for all members of the Inn, and particularly for those who are members of the project team so closely involved in this major redevelopment by Sir Robert McAlpine Special Projects, and some of whom I’ve met tonight. We’ve been reminded about the importance of education to the Inns. So, these new spaces are providing state-of-theart training facilities, and it’s bringing that old and new together to create a very new era in the Inn’s life and work.
It will certainly enhance the Inn’s core purpose of providing excellent legal education, and it will enable it to continue to provide the outstanding library services to train students and pupil members of the Inn. A lot of that – as technology has grown on the back of the pandemic, and if there was something to be gained from all that pivoting that went on so busily during the pandemic, learning the lessons of how much technology could do for you, but also learning what it doesn’t – has added to the success of this building and this project. It already has an impressive record of outreach activities. And I think this will hugely help you to encourage underrepresented groups to enter the profession and contribute to its diversity, as you also provide support for students through the generous annual scholarships, worth some £2 million, out of an annual budget of some £5 million spent on all aspects of education and training.
It already has an impressive record of outreach activities. And I think this will hugely help you to encourage under-represented groups to enter the profession and contribute to its diversity.
I’ve also had the opportunity to meet some of the recipients of those scholarships tonight. And I think it’s obvious that they have also been well-supported, and very effectively so, through the Inn’s excellent education programmes provided by the Education and Training Department, with a bit of pivoting thrown in just to add a little variation.
May I finally just offer my congratulations to all of you who have brought The Inner Temple to this point in its long history. I certainly wish you well in continuing that history, which we will be a small part of – for a bit longer – possibly. But for the way in which you continue to support the education and training of students, pupils and barristers in upholding the rule of law, and I hope you all feel that this is a contribution to the long-term future of that, which is what the Inn has always stood for.
So, it gives me a very great pleasure to declare the Treasury Building is reopened for business – but you couldn’t have done this yesterday! Congratulations!
Master Her Royal Highness The Princess Royal
