Aldersgate Street is rather confusing. Even locals and taxi drivers are frequently confused about where Aldersgate Street ends and Goswell Road begins, since it is a completely straight road with no apparent marks of division. The invisible point of division , in fact, occurs in the party wall dividing two terraced houses.
That is not how it has always been. Carthusian Street used to be the dividing line between the two roads. Carthusian Street is the boundary between the City of London and the London Borough of Islington – the south side and Smithfield is in the City, and the north side and Charterhouse Square is in Islington. There used to be a visible landmark called “Aldersgate Bars” which indicated where Aldersgate Street and Goswell Street met but whatever that was, there is no sign of it these days.
The Barbican Estate is the most likely explanation for the change, The northern half of the estate is on land which was within the London Borough of Islington, so the boundary was changed so that the whole estate would be inside the City of London – who were paying to build it, after all.
But even that earlier division was not the original arrangement. There were actually three roads, not two. Historically, there were two quite separate parts to what we now call Aldersgate Street. The small section of road from Long Lane (and north of the Beech Street tunnel under the Barbican) as far as the mysterious Aldersgate Bars was called Pickaxe Street. This name was originally ‘Pickt Hatch Street’. It was famous in Elizabethan times as an area of brothels – it gets a mention in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor.
The name ‘Aldersgate Street’ commemorates the historic Alder’s Gate, one of the mediaeval gates into the City of London. The gate itself has long vanished but its position is roughly where St Botolph’s Church still stands, just south of London Wall and the roundabout. It’s full name is ‘St Botolph’s without Aldersgate’ (‘without’ meaning outside).
The long southern part of Aldersgate Street from the roundabout to Long Lane and Beech Street was extensively bombed in the Second World War and now has the Barbican estate along the east side and a series of big office developments along the west side.
The former Pickaxe Street section also has the Barbican estate along its east side, but it’s west side now contains a mixture of new-ish blocks and surviving converted period houses.
That terrace property which is the last building before Goswell Road is No. 107 Aldersgate Street. It appears from a plaque on the wall that there used to be a water fountain here which was donated by Robert Besley, Lord Mayor of London from 1869-70.
Next to it is No. 108 Aldersgate Street which is a big brown box of a building, on the corner with Glasshouse Yard.
Nos. 110-115 Aldersgate Street is Cathedral Lodge. It is a long way from St Paul’s Cathedral, but perhaps someone standing on a chair on the top floor could just about make out the top of the dome. It was a 19th-century warehouse here which was destroyed by wartime bombing. In In 1964, a 19th-century warehouse was demolished to make way for a warehouse and factory called Steinberg House. Steinberg & Sons specialised in ladies clothing.
It is a seven-storey block resting on columns covered in black glass mosaic. (It has a look a bit like a drive-through hotel.) The building was redeveloped and converted into flats for Barratts Homes in 1995 and that’s also when it got its Cathedral Lodge name.
No. 120 Aldersgate Street is an office block built in 1978 by British Land and originally called Priory Field House. (It wasn’t any of those.) The building was completely revamped and made to look much more up-to-date by BeeBee Developments Ltd in 2000.
The buildings from there to the corner of Carthusian Street are more traditional brick-built buildings. No. 123 Aldersgate Street is actually quite modern; it was built in 1980 as a small office building. It has a passage underneath it which runs through to No. 124 Aldersgate Street in a courtyard at the back.
No. 124 Aldersgate Street was a Victorian factory-warehouse which was used for light industrial manufacturing into the 1970s. It was then converted so beautifully that it might almost be a film set for a period drama. It’s retained the original crane on the exterior and, if it were not for the warehouse windows, you would think it had always been an elegant house.
Nos 125 – 127 Aldersgate Street are quite tall and narrow houses built in 1855. Now they all have shops on the ground floor. They have fairly decorative windows above. The most decorative building in the row, on the Carthusian Street corner, is now the home of Vecchio Parioli.
The rather grand building on the southern corner of Carthusian Street is No. 131 Aldersgate Street and Nos. 14 to 17 Carthusian Street. It looks like it must have been designed and constructed as a single building. But not so. The developers owned the land in the two streets but they couldn’t buy the Red Lion pub which sat right on the corner at No. 130 Aldersgate Street. So they built two buildings quite separately – one in Aldersgate Street and one in Carthusian Street, and waited patiently until they were able to buy the Red Lion as well. And then they filled in the missing bit. It is an admirable bit of planning, because the final structure looks like it has always been a single building.
The very ornate building next to Barbican tube station is a typical bank building, which was built in 1874 for the London & County Bank and which is now occupied by its descendent, Nat West Bank.
Barbican tube station on the corner with Long Lane
