London calling.
London Walks connecting.
This… is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time. History time.
London used to have gates.
Real gates.
Great stone interruptions in the wall. Places where London stopped and the world beyond began.
And perhaps the most underestimated of them was Aldersgate.
No Traitors’ Heads glamour like London Bridge. Not much in that line, anyway.
No Tower of London nearby. No tourist queues today taking selfies beside the remains.
In fact there are no remains.
Just traffic. Offices. The Barbican. Bits and pieces. Fragments.
But for nearly two thousand years Aldersgate was one of the great funnels into London. If you came south from St Albans, from the Midlands, from the North, there was a good chance London would first properly happen to you here.
At Aldersgate.
So what do you know, somewhere along the line we’ve stumbled into a little mini-series about London’s vanished gates. A few days ago it was Aldgate. Today it’s Aldersgate.
One by one these lost thresholds are quietly rebuilding medieval London around us.
And what a wonderfully London sort of place it turned out to be.
Roman beginnings. Medieval bustle.
Coaching inns. Religious revelation. Ghost stories. Shakespeare rumours. Milton. A few severed heads. City traders. Georgian demolition. Brutalist rebirth.
An entire London history in one vanished gate.
The first thing to know is that Aldersgate was old. Very old. It began life as one of the gateways through London’s Roman wall.
Built in the centuries when London was still Londinium, it guarded one of the principal roads leading north out of the city.
Which meant that for centuries untold thousands of people passed through it. Merchants heading for market. Pilgrims setting out on long journeys. Royal messengers. Soldiers. Farmers bringing produce into the city. Travellers arriving from the north, blinking as London unfolded before them.
Now as for the name, Aldersgate…
Nobody’s quite sure where the name came from.
Some scholars think it may derive from an Anglo-Saxon personal name. Others have suggested a connection with aldermen. The argument has been going on for centuries and shows no sign of stopping.
Which somehow feels appropriate for London.
What we do know is the medieval gate became increasingly ramshackle over the years. There are old reports warning that it was close to collapse. You can just picture the civic worthies standing around looking anxiously upward while carts and horses clattered underneath.
Eventually, in 1617, they rebuilt it.
And this new Aldersgate was no mere defensive structure. It was a statement piece.
A ceremonial gateway.
A bit of Stuart theatre.
There were statues.
Royal arms.
Decorative flourishes. London dressing itself up to impress arrivals.
King James I made his ceremonial entry through it.
That’s one of the things gates used to do. They staged London. They framed the city dramatically.
They turned arrival into an event.
And Aldersgate stood at an especially interesting threshold because the neighbourhood around it had a split personality.
Part City.
Part suburb.
Part commerce.
Part escape hatch from commerce.
To the south lay the packed, noisy, money-making square mile.
To the north, gradually, more air, more space, inns, gardens, fields beyond.
Aldersgate Street itself became one of those slightly grand London thoroughfares that faded in and out of fashion depending on the century.
At various times wealthy merchants and important figures lived there.
The Bishop of London had a residence nearby.
Big houses lined parts of the street.
One old observer compared it to an Italian street because of its width and elegance.
Though London being London, another observer dryly noted that fashionable society had largely moved elsewhere.
Translation: yesterday’s smart set.
And then there are the stories.
Wonderful stories.
One of the strangest happened in 1554.
A teenage serving maid named Elizabeth Crofts was hidden behind a wall near Aldersgate and used as a sort of human loudspeaker for anti-Catholic propaganda. Crowds gathered to hear mysterious voices seemingly issuing from nowhere.
Tudor London went absolutely berserk over it.
People always think mass hysteria was invented by social media.
Nonsense.
Londoners have been losing their collective minds for centuries.
And Aldersgate has another colossal literary ghost attached to it.
John Milton.
The John Milton.
Paradise Lost Milton.
He lived nearby, in a garden house in the Aldersgate district. Imagine that for a moment. Milton walking this neighbourhood.
Milton hearing the traffic rumbling through the gate. Milton stepping out into the London air here after the Restoration had gone disastrously wrong for him politically.
Blind.
Dangerously associated with the defeated Puritan regime.
A man who had gone from being one of the intellectual heavyweights of the Commonwealth to somebody who suddenly had every reason to keep his head down.
And yes, in seventeenth-century London “keep your head down” could occasionally be rather more than a metaphor.
Because Aldersgate did indeed display severed heads.
Not as many as London Bridge. London Bridge was the undisputed world heavyweight champion of head-displaying.
But Aldersgate occasionally got in on the act.
One of the heads exhibited there belonged to the regicide judge John Cooke, one of the men involved in sending Charles I to the scaffold.
Imagine the atmosphere.
You pass beneath the gate into London and above you, rotting slowly on spikes, are the remains of traitors.
A city making a statement.
Obey.
Or else.
And somewhere in that same district lives Milton, who had passionately defended the execution of Charles I.
You can feel history crackling around the place.
And yes, Aldersgate also has its Wesley connection.
We’ve already talked, in another episode, about that famous May evening in 1738 when John Wesley attended a religious meeting in Aldersgate Street and afterwards wrote that his heart had been “strangely warmed.”
But it’s worth pausing over the geography of it.
Not Westminster.
Not St Paul’s.
Not Lambeth Palace.
A side street by an old city gate.
That feels deeply London somehow.
The great turning points often happen in modest places.
And then there are the Shakespeare rumours.
At various times people claimed Shakespeare had lived in Aldersgate Street. The evidence is wafer-thin. Practically transparent.
But London adores attaching Shakespeare to places.
It’s one of the city’s favourite indoor sports.
And frankly I rather enjoy the possibility of him wandering this district.
You can imagine him slipping through the gate at dusk, hearing the racket of the city, catching snippets of tavern conversation,
storing away voices for future plays.
Whether he did or didn’t, Aldersgate was certainly the sort of place he would have known.
By the eighteenth century the gate itself had become a nuisance.
London was expanding rapidly.
Traffic was increasing. Coaches, wagons, carts, horses, people.
The gate had become a bottleneck.
So in 1761 they demolished it.
Gone.
Just like that.
Which is another very London thing.
London is sentimental about almost everything except London itself.
The city tears down its past with astonishing cheerfulness and then spends the next two hundred years wistfully regretting it.
Still, traces linger.
The street name survives.
The line of the old wall survives in places nearby.
Stand near the Barbican and with a little imagination you can almost reconstruct it.
The gate.
The wall.
The press of travellers entering the city.
The smell of horses.
Wood smoke.
Wet wool.
And overhead that peculiar London sky, low and silvery and full of weather.
Today the area is dominated by the Barbican.
Concrete terraces. Elevated walkways. Brutalist geometry.
One of the most argued-over landscapes in London.
Some people think it’s magnificent.
Others think it resembles the headquarters of a highly authoritarian moon colony.
Personally, I rather like the fact that one of the boldest pieces of twentieth-century London sits directly on top of Roman London, medieval London and Georgian London.
That’s Aldersgate in a nutshell.
Layer upon layer upon layer.
A threshold across time as much as space.
And perhaps that’s why these old gates matter.
They remind us that London was once a walled city.
A place you entered ceremonially.
A place with edges. Boundaries. Portals.
Today London just sort of sprawls.
But once upon a time you arrived through a gate.
And if you came from the north, there was every chance that gate was Aldersgate.
Yes, London calling.
The call of the wild.
London’s wild and woolly past.
And today London was calling from one of its lost doorways.
See you tomorrow