Aldersgate Street

The roundabout at the southern end of Aldersgate Street marks where the gate once stood. A plaque on Alder Castle House identifies the spot; the gate itself came down in 1761, its entire fabric sold at auction for just £91. Today’s street runs north through Blackfriars into a corridor of postwar office blocks and the Barbican Estate — the largest single arts and residential complex in Europe — built atop the ruins that the Blitz left behind.

St Botolph’s church still stands at the southern end, as it has since the 12th century, a small Georgian building tucked against the old wall line. Barbican Underground station occupies the corner where a Victorian hotel once hosted juries attending the Old Bailey. The name of the street is one of the oldest in the City — and that name is not as simple as it looks.

2012

Aldersgate Street EC2

Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 2.0

2019

10 Aldersgate Street London EC1A 4HJ

Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0

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Historical image not found

Today

Buildings by London Wall, near the Barbican — near Aldersgate Street

Geograph · CC BY-SA 2.0

The name is older than any building on the street. It is first recorded around the year 1000 in the form Ealdredesgate — meaning “gate associated with a man named Ealdrād”, most likely a Saxon landowner whose identity is otherwise unrecorded. As documented by British History Online, the street name appears in medieval records under successive spellings: Aldresgatestrete in the reign of Edward I, Aldrichesgate Street in 1332, and Aldergatestrete by 1349, before consolidating as AldersgateStreete in Stow’s time.

Tudor chronicler John Stow rejected folk explanations — that the name derived from elder trees or from the aldermen who built the gate — arguing instead that it simply meant the “elder” or older gate. Modern scholarship holds that the name derives from the Old English Ealdredesgate, “Ealdred’s gate,” with the possessive ending dropping away through Middle English phonetic shifts, producing Aldresgate by the 13th century and Aldersgate by the late medieval period. The street inherited the name when it grew beyond the gate.

The London Wall was first built around the year 200, but Aldersgate was not one of the original Roman gates, being added later in the Roman period. Its origins go back to late Roman times — it was apparently created to strengthen the city’s northern defences, and was built with two roadways passing through the wall protected by semi-circular towers. The street beyond grew gradually, gaining greater importance as Smithfield developed as a market for horses and cattle.

The old gate was taken down in 1617 and rebuilt in the same year from a design by Gerard Christmas. The gate was damaged in the Great Fire of London in 1666 but was repaired and remained until 1761. By the 18th century the street had become a long, spacious thoroughfare lined with aristocratic mansions — London House, the Bishop of London’s city residence; Shaftesbury House; and Lauderdale House, demolished in 1708. According to records held by British History Online, the street was described in 1756 as “very spacious and long” with buildings that were old but “well inhabited.”

Most of the buildings on Aldersgate Street were destroyed or badly damaged in the Second World War. The entire length of the eastern side of the street is now occupied by a part of the 40-acre Barbican residential and arts complex. The northern section, formerly Pickax Street, was incorporated into Aldersgate Street’s full extent only from the late 18th century.

Aldersgate Street was a centre of printing in Tudor and Stuart London. Printer John Day, renowned for his publication of John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, lived in Aldersgate, and in 1551 reprinted Edmund Becke’s edition of the Bible under his sole imprint. John Milton took a house here after returning from Italy, and the copyright of Paradise Lost was sold in 1667 to a printer on the same street. The poet Thomas Flatman was born here in 1633. At Nos. 35–38 stood Shaftesbury House, built around 1644 by Inigo Jones, demolished in 1882.

The street also carries a famously tenuous Shakespeare connection. No. 134 bore a sign for years reading “This was Shakespeare’s House.” Although the building was close to the Fortune Playhouse, no documentary evidence confirms Shakespeare resided here; a subsidy roll of 1598 shows a “William Shakespeare” as owner, but nothing identifies him as the playwright. The Barbican’s Shakespeare Tower now carries the tradition.

John Wesley is the figure most closely associated with the street in popular memory, but the street’s residential and commercial history runs much deeper. John Milton lived here after his return from Italy, describing his house in a garden off the street as chosen “for the privacy” — one of few places in the City then free from noise. James Petiver, the botanist, was an apothecary on Aldersgate Street; he was one of the earliest collectors of natural history specimens in England, and Sir Hans Sloane offered £5,000 for his collection.

The printer John Day lived “over Aldersgate” in the 16th century, publishing works of John Foxe and Roger Ascham from the rooms above the gate itself. In 1554, the street was the scene of a notable fraud: Elizabeth Crofts was smuggled into a wall to impersonate a heavenly voice, and reputedly 17,000 people came to hear her deliver anti-Catholic propaganda. Not every voice on this street was authentic.

The Second World War erased almost everything on Aldersgate Street’s east side. The Victorian Manchester Hotel — a 240-room landmark popular with Old Bailey juries — suffered severe bomb damage and was demolished. The General Post Office, which had occupied the site of a collegiate church founded in 750 by Withu, King of Kent, had already closed in 1910 and been demolished shortly afterwards. Adjacent to the modern roundabout on the site of the gate was the former headquarters of the General Post Office and the adjoining Postman’s Park.

In its place rose the Barbican Estate from the 1960s onwards — an ambitious brutalist complex of flats, arts venues, and towers covering 40 acres. Barbican Underground station on Aldersgate Street opened in 1865 as Aldersgate Street station; it was renamed Aldersgate in 1910, then Aldersgate & Barbican in 1924, before finally becoming Barbican in 1968. The Museum of London occupied a building on the western edge of the Barbican from 1976 until its closure in December 2022 ahead of its move to West Smithfield.

Aldersgate Street forms a short section of the A1 road — the route that runs all the way to Edinburgh. At its northern end it becomes Goswell Road at the junction with Fann Street; at its southern end it flows into St Martin’s Le Grand. The street today is primarily office territory: 200 Aldersgate at the south and a succession of modern blocks along the west side contrast with the Barbican towers and walkways on the east. Excavations in the area, as reported by MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology), have repeatedly uncovered Roman remains beneath the street and its immediate surroundings, including sections of London Wall and Roman ditches.

St Botolph-without-Aldersgate remains the street’s defining human-scale landmark, its churchyard opening into Postman’s Park with the Watts Memorial to Heroic Self Sacrifice. The parish church of St Botolph was rebuilt in 1790–91 on the site of the original church. Historic England lists St Botolph’s as a Grade I listed building, one of a small number of listed structures in the otherwise heavily redeveloped street. The plaque on Alder Castle House marks the gate that gave the street its name and started this 2,000-year story.