In a recent video I repeated a statement I’d been told by a Freeman of the City of London, and somebody who’d worked in the Lord Mayor’s office. He’d declared that there are ‘no roads in the City of London’. In the comments of that video several people countered that in fact the lower section of Goswell Road was inside the City and therefore rendered that statement factually incorrect.
So I set off on a stroll down the length of Goswell Road, starting at the Angel Islington, to explore the story of the road itself and find the point at which it crossed the border into the Square Mile. It was a fascinating journey into the past of this storied thoroughfare. As to whether in fact it is the City’s only ‘Road’ is ever so slightly inconclusive as can be seen in the comments, with recent boundary changes bringing the Golden Lane Estate into the City of London, and the question of whether the City of London Police or the Metropolitan Police have jurisdiction over the road itself.
The City of London continues to be a source of endless curiosity.
I was passing the Marx Memorial Library on Clerkenwell Green at lunchtime and realised that I’d never actually been inside. Not even as an eager Politics student in my youth. The papery smell in the reading room instantly transported me back through the years. It was intoxicating for a brief moment.
The worker of the future upsetting the economic chaos of the present by Jack Hastings
The Library was established on the 50th anniversary of Marx’s death in 1933, ‘with the aim of advancing education, knowledge and learning in the science of Marxism, the history of socialism and the working class movement’, at a time of book burnings in Nazi Germany. It had previously been the print house for Twentieth Century Press which was linked to William Morris and Eleanor Marx (Karl’s daughter). Morris’ contribution is recounted on information plaques around the walls. The fine 18th century building was constructed in 1737 as the Welsh Charity School.
The Lenin Room commemorates V.I Lenin’s presence working in the building between 1902-03 where he published several issues of the newspaper Iskra, which can still be found on the desk. Although this isn’t the exact room in which he worked. During this period Lenin lived nearby in Percy Circus – a plaque marks the building.
The walls are plastered with various socialist and Soviet posters. The Bakers’ Union were having a meeting, so we unfortunately couldn’t see the hall nor the memorial garden to the British International Brigades who fought in the Spanish Civil War. The Library holds over 55,000 books, pamphlets and periodicals, including some unique collections.
“For the first time, the entire collection of 50 paintings and works on paper by the artist belonging to Italy’s Magnani-Rocca Foundation will be on show in the UK. Best known for his enigmatic still lifes, Morandi is today widely recognised as one of the most significant figures of modern Italian art – and certainly one of the most beloved. Often considered to have been something of a recluse, he was in fact at the centre of contemporary artistic debate and actively engaged with many of the most important national trends and movements of his day, from Futurism to Metaphysical Art. His distinctive mature style is renowned for its masterful treatment of light, exquisite tonal subtleties and exploration of the boundary between abstract and figurative imagery.”
We discovered the Estorick when living in Highbury in the late-90s and instantly fell in love with it.
I’d first properly encountered the work of Giorgio Morandi when living in Modena, Italy and visiting an exhibition in an art gallery located in one of the palaces of the Este. Morandi had lived and worked his whole life in nearby Bologna, a city I also came to develop a deep affection for.
A walk linking together Bunhill Fields, Bunhill Row, Old Street, St Luke’s, and City Road. Taking in the burial places of William Blake, Daniel Defoe and Hawksmoor’s obelisk on St Luke’s Church.
Why do I always end up around the edge of the city in December and January? I associate this area with being freezing cold and it being a kind of gloomy cloudy day like the day I shot this video just before Christmas 2021. It was the perfect weather for this particular walk linking together series of really intriguing locations with great stories to tell. This is really the best type of walk in many ways. Obviously I love my river walks, I love all walks really, but there’s something about unlocking the secrets of the city which is just magical. There’s something about the city fringe, the nature of it, the stories it contains which is really potent and really resonant because of the things that were pushed outside the city walls. I headed north of Liverpool Street into once what would have been fenland and marshland where the River Walbrook rises, a place of dissenters and outlaws and outcasts, a place of pleasure and play. These are all things encountered on the walk.
psychogeographic alignments of London from Lud Heat by Iain SinclairBunhill Fields
The Route: This walk starts near Liverpool Street on the edge of the City of London and heads along Worship Street to Finsbury Barracks, home of the Honourable Artillery Company. Next to the Barracks we find Bunhill Fields an old burial ground were numerous religious dissenters were buried including Daniel Defoe and William Blake. We walk along Bunhill Row where John Milton lived and wrote both Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained.The secret alignments of the City lead us to Old Street believed to have been a Roman road between Silchester and Colchester built along an even older trackway. Here we find St Luke’s Church designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor. Our route takes us past Ironmonger Row Baths to Peerless Street once the site of a notorious pool that became a Ducking Pond and later a bath house with a library. We then emerge on City Road and our walk ends at The Eagle pub in Shepherdess Walk which is mentioned in the nursery rhyme, Pop Goes the Weasel.
This was a walk that I first did in 2005 and blogged about here. I’d stumbled across an article by Guy Mannes Abbott published in the Architects Association journal that linked the Civil War Parliamentary defences of London to the progressive architecture of the London Borough of Finsbury in the post-war period. The idea that the streets that I walked home in the dark each night were part of a ‘utopian enclosure’ was incredibly beguiling.
“The forts mark an area known for its spas and radical reformers and which, in the seventeenth century, Wenceslaus Hollar represented in a series of etchings showing extensive earthworks. They protected an area that would become the site of the largest and most ambitious plan ever for the social regeneration of London and which remains a paragon of what could be achieved with social housing. Spa Green, Bevin Court and Priory Green just north of Finsbury are all positive manifestations of a politically committed and revolutionarily ambitious approach to collective works, but – conscious of what there was to fight for – Tecton also produced a plan for an elaborate system of defences and network of communications with uncanny echoes of the Civil War forts.”
from ‘The Malignants trecherous and bloody plot against the Parliament and Citty of London which was by God’s providence happily prevented May 31, 1643’
I’d been intending to make a video of this walk for my Walking Vlog series ever since starting it in 2015, but had delayed and delayed as I considered that a true walk of London’s Civil War defences should at least cover the section north of the Thames from Wapping in the East to Pimilico in the West (where the Lillington Gardens Estate that stands of the site of the fort has an oddly fortress-like appearance). But then, first I encountered the southern ‘line of communication’ while walking the River Neckinger, followed by reading an article in London Archaeologist debating the location of the defences around Whitechapel. I was faced by an edifice of research that was difficult to penetrate.
Eventually, the landscape called me. The original walk of the Finsbury Forts was too rich not to capture on camera, and so I headed out on the day the clocks went back to retrace my steps from 17 years ago. Picking up the traces of that walk on the edge of the City of London I headed up Goswell Road to Mount Mills and then followed the deep entrenchment across Northampton Square to the site of Waterfield Fort, now occupied by Spa Green Estate. From here I progressed down Rosebery Ave to Mount Pleasant Fort before ascending Amwell Street to the Fort Royal which occupied a commanding position on the crest of the hill at Claremont Square near the Angel Islington.
A walk from Charterhouse Square to the Clerks’ Well
There’s something in the atmosphere of the City fringe that draws me in around midwinter and the turning of the year. That once dubious territory outside the old Roman walls where rivers ran off the rising ground into the Fleet and the Thames. It’s a place of stories. So on New Years Day I set out to capture some of the magic and the mysteries between Charterhouse Square and the Clerks’ Well.
The draw at the beginning was the medieval priory and almshouses of the Charterhouse, but to get there you pass over the buried remains of around 40,000 victims of the Black Death. The water supply to this 14th Century hermitage of Carthusian monks came along the White Conduit from a source in Barnsbury which later became the celebrated White Conduit House pleasure garden. There’s still a tavern on the site but last time I looked it’d become a restaurant.
Charterhouse
There were very few people around as I looked for the course of the lost river Faggeswell, that once formed a boundary on the southern edge of Clerkenwell. I’d place the course along where Charterhouse Street runs along one side of Smithfield Market. I could have then picked up the cattle route along Cowcross Street but instead took St. John’s Lane to pass through the majestic St. John’s Gate, built in 1504 – a chunk of medieval London hiding in plain site.
St. John’s Gate
The ancient trackway of Clerkenwell Road is crossed on the way to Clerkenwell Green where I imagined the mystery plays being performed around the Skinner’s Well and the Clerks’ Well. The second of these is remembered in the name it gave to the area and also the plaque in Farringon Lane marking its location. The Skinner’s Well though seems to have been forgotten, a process that started long ago. Writing in 1910, Alfred Stanley Foord remarked;
“Skinners’ Well is there described as lying in the valley between the Nun’s Priory and the Holeburn, in which was a large fish-pond… Strype, in his continuation of Stow’s Survey (1720) say, ‘Skinners’ Well is almost quite lost, and so it was in Stow’s time. But I am certainly informed by a knowing parishioner that it lies to the west of the church (of St. James, Clerkenwell), enclosed within certain houses there.’ The parish would fain recover the well again, but cannot tell where the pipes lie. But Dr Rogers, who formerly lived in an house there, showed Mr Edmund Howard…marks in a wall in the close where, as he affirmed, the pipes lay, that it might be known after his death.”
However, there’s no plaque that I could see around St. James Church and the name lives on solely in the presence of Skinner Street.
Clerkenwell Green with its radical roots felt like an appropriate place to end the walk for the video and to look ahead at 2022. I’ve a good feeling about the coming year.
A walk from Homerton through Hackney, Dalston, Newington Green to Highbury Barn
The pull of nostalgia is a powerful thing. It was during the first lockdown that I devised this walk from Leytonstone to Highbury – from my current home to one from my past laced with happy memories. It was a comforting thought in such an uncertain time. Now in the first week of the third national lockdown it seems an apt moment to post this video of that walk which I finally embarked upon during the second lockdown.
It starts on Homerton High Street, which was recorded as Humberton in the 14th Century, and is said to be derived from a lady’s farmstead Hunburh. We take a look at the Tudor Sutton House built in 1535, before walking through St. John’s Gardens to Hackney Central. Along Mare Street we pay homage to the Hackney Empire, designed by Frank Matcham in 1901 as a Music Hall.
Our walk takes up Graham Road to Ridley Road Market, Dalston and then along Kingsland Road (Ermine Street) to the Rio Cinema. Next we go up John Campbell Road and Mildmay Road to Newington Green where we look at Richard Price’s Unitarian Chapel built in 1701.
From here we pass along Ferntower Road to Petherton Road where the New River runs beneath a green strip of land running along the middle of the street.
Highbury Fields
Highbury New Park takes us to Highbury Grove and we turn up Baalbec Road to Highbury Place.
Highbury Fields is one of my favourite spots in London, a beautiful open space covering a high ridge of land which was once known for its springs and conduits. We walk around Highbury Fields contemplating the possibility that the name suggests that this was once the location of an ancient burial mound, barrow or fortification given that the area was previously known as Newington Barrow.
Our walk ends at Highbury Barn at the site of the former pleasure garden famed for its milk, custards, and concerts.
