When I first started working in Smithfield, it struck me as odd that there were two St John’s Squares. There is a large square next to Zetter’s, and another one across the road, next to St John’s Gate. But I didn’t give it a lot of thought. As an estate agent, you quickly get used to the weirdness of street naming and numbering in a historic area like this. But eventually I discovered the reason – and the reason was Clerkenwell Road.
Clerkenwell Road seems as solidly historic as all the rest of Clerkenwell. But it turns out to be a relatively recent addition to the local landscape. It wasn’t an original London road at all.
The two St John’s Squares of today were part of one big St John’s Square, attached to the ancient Priory of St John which dominated the area in the Middle Ages and used to own most of the land nearby. The Priory itself fell victim to Henry VIII’s destruction of the monasteries. But the square remained.
Then the Victorian road planners arrived. They had a grand plan. They wanted to create a main road crossing London from the West End to the East End, bypassing the crowded streets of the City itself. They wanted a direct arterial road from Oxford Street to Old Street and onwards to Bethnal Green. (In fact, a proposal to build a new street from St John Street to Goswell Road was made to the governors of Charterhouse by some ‘workmen’ as far back as 1726, which was favourably received at the time, but the scheme fizzled out.)
When the new road was under discussion again, there was only a loosely connected jumble of local streets. We get some idea of how far Clerkenwell was from the centre of things in the early 19th century from the name of the local road which ran roughly between Goswell Road and St John Street. It was called ‘Wilderness Row’.
One thing stood in the way of the new highway, and that was St John’s Square. So they steamrolled right through the middle of it, rebuilt Wilderness Row, and called it Clerkenwell Road.
A more welcome casualty of the new highway was ‘Little Hell’, an infamous slum between the north ends of Turnmill and Britton streets, which was cleared to make way for construction.
Once the Metropolitan Board of Works had overseen the completion of the new road in 1878, they offered building plots all along it on either side on 80-year leases. By the mid-1890s, the road was lined with new buildings. The result was mostly warehouses and factories. One of the earliest buildings was a gold chain factory on the corner with Albemarle Street.
When both sides of Clerkenwell Road had been built up, it was nothing like it is today. The street scene was a hodgepodge of commercial and industrial buildings. Some of the buildings may be the same, but they were used completely differently nowadays. And therein lies the rich heritage of Clerkenwell Road! – not so much the buildings themselves, more the uses to which the occupiers put them.
Clerkenwell Road: from Goswell Road to St John Street
Clerkenwell Road: from St John Street to Farringdon Road