Golden Lane Estate

The first city of London, built by the Romans, was razed to the ground by Boadicea in the 1st century AD. The Romans rebuilt it with a protective fort at the north east corner. Houses sprung up outside the gate and the area eventually became known as ‘Barbicana’ – the Roman word for battlements. In Anglo-Saxon times, the gate itself was called ‘Crepul-Gate’ which meant ‘low gate’ or ‘gate for creeping through’. The Norman newcomers misunderstood this as ‘Cripple Gate’ and when they built the church, whose successor still stands in the Barbican, they named it for St Giles, the Patron Saint of Cripples.

The full name of the church was St Giles without Cripplegate, because Barbican was outside the City wall. This was a significant factor in its long history. The City was for respectable burghers - the members of the City guilds and livery companies. Police and the courts operated only within the City walls. Each night the City gates were locked to keep the bad elements out. A certain attraction of the Barbican was that the City law did not extend there, so it became a denizen for cut-purses and cut-throats.

By the 12th century, there was a horse fair in Smithfield every week, beginning its history as the capital’s livestock market. According to Jonathan Swift, “a Smithfield bargain” became the proverbial phrase for a sharp deal. There was an annual Cloth Fair, which became the biggest commercial fair for cloth in England. It was also known as Bartholomew Fair, because its tolls went to support Bart's Hospital. Cloth Fair had one tradition which has survived it: the fair was officially opened by the Lord Mayor ceremonially cutting a piece of cloth – a tradition which has been extended to new public buildings everywhere. (“Cloth Fair” remains as the name of a road behind Long Lane).

Between markets and fairs, Smithfield was convenient for public executions. William Wallace was executed there in 1305. Tournaments were held there also. On a darker note, thousands of victims of the Black Death were buried in a huge mass grave under Charterhouse Square.

In Tudor times the denizens of the Cripplegate area were not genteel. The drawback of being outside the City wall was that you lost even the little protection of the law which the City government provided. But that was what drew the Cripplegate inhabitants. They included receivers of stolen goods, silver refiners to dispose of any silver plate that might come to hand, makers of fake jewellery and coin clippers (before coins had milled edges), and kept their melting-pot ready day and night for. Tanners and skinners, catgut makers, tallow melters, dealers in old clothes, and charcoal sellers were some of the legitimate businesses of the area. Ale and beer houses and gambling joints stood at the edge of the moor. Many ale houses included bear baiting pits. Murders were frequent, but there was no facility for investigating them. Forgers, professional pick-purses (there were no pockets), thieves, conjurors, wizards and fortune tellers, beggars and prostitutes all found the area particularly congenial.

The puritanical City wouldn’t allow theatrical productions in the square mile, which is why the main theatres of the day were outside its borders, like the Fortune in Golden Lane and the Globe across the river. When in 1600 Edward Alleyn wanted a new theatre, as a home for the Admiral’s men, and to compete with Shakespeare’s Globe, he built the Fortune Theatre in Golden Lane, just outside the City limits. So it was completely natural that Shakespeare would have to take lodgings with a Huguenot family in the area. The Huguenots were just one of the waves of immigrants to the area. The relative freedom from the law also attracted religious non-conformists in the 17th Century. Daniel Defoe, William Blake and John Bunyan are all buried in Bunhill Fields. Bethlehem – shortened to ‘Bedlam’- just up the road near Old Street, became the country’s first lunatic asylum.

The population was altered by an influx of immigrants. After the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which had given French protestants or Huguenots some protection from persecution as Protestants in Catholic France, many Huguenots fled to England and took refuge in Cripplegate. The Irish also settled in large numbers. It became renowned as the area for gambling houses and bowling alleys. Pillories and whipping posts were standard street furniture.

Red Cross Street was the major street of the Outer Ward, separating the more prosperous west, from the increasingly impoverished east near Moor Field. Red Cross Street followed the route of the old Roman road north from the Cripple Gate. What remains of it is now Golden Lane. The rest has disappeared under the Barbican Estate. To the east of Red Cross Street was a maze of courts and alleys where which was a no-go area even for the Watch. By the end of the 18th century it was the City’s red light district.

By the 18th Century this was a warren of slums and ‘red light’ areas. It was all finally swept away by industrialisation. By the end of the 19th Century the slums had been replaced by warehouses and train yards. The Great Cripplegate fire of 1897 began in an ostrich feather warehouse and cleared much of what remained of the old area. By the start of the 20th century only 6,000 people lived in the area. It was to get worse before it got better - on a single night in December 1940, the Luftwaffe destroyed virtually every building from Aldersgate Street to Moorgate.

What to do with this enormous bomb site exercised the minds of the City Council for over two decades. In 1951 there was an architectural competition to design the Golden Lane Estate, just north of the Barbican. This was won by Geoffry Powell, a lecturer at Kingston Polytechnic. He brought in his colleagues, Peter Chamberlin and Christoph Bon. The Golden Lane Estate was born.

 

 

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