Bishopsgate

• 1. Introduction

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  Bishopsgate has stood at the edge of London's story for nearly two thousand years. It began as a gap in a Roman wall, a point where Ermine Street, the ancient road to York, passed through the city's defenses. By the time the gate was finally pulled down in 1760, it had been set on fire by rebel forces, rebuilt by foreign merchants seeking trading rights, and decorated with the severed heads of criminals. What made a single gate in a city wall so contested, so storied, and so central to London's identity? And what became of the street, the ward, and the neighborhoods that grew up around it?

• 2. The Gate Itself

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  Ermine Street was already an established road long before Roman engineers raised the wall that made a gate necessary. The wall followed; the road came first. Earconwald, who served as Bishop of London in the 7th century, is the figure tradition credits with giving the gate its name, though the exact nature of that connection has long been debated.

  In 1471, during the Wars of the Roses, a Yorkist-turned-Lancastrian commander known as Bastard Fauconberg arrived outside London with five thousand men and artillery. He attacked Bishopsgate and came close to taking the nearby gate of Aldgate before his forces were driven back with heavy losses, chased all the way to Bow Bridge and Blackwall. The gate he had tried to breach was rebuilt that same year, not by English authorities but by the Hansa merchants, who paid for the reconstruction in exchange for privileges at their London trading house, the Steelyard.

  A second rebuilding came in 1735, this time funded by the City authorities. The gate that stood through that final century of its existence was also the one that displayed the heads of executed criminals on spikes. It lasted only until 1760, when it was demolished for good. Today the site is marked not by any grand monument but by a stone bishop's mitre fixed high on a building near the junction with Wormwood Street, facing the Heron Tower.

• 3. The Ward's Two Halves

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  London Wall divided Bishopsgate into two distinct zones that carried their difference in their very names. Bishopsgate Within sat inside the line of the old wall; Bishopsgate Without stretched beyond it into what would later be called London's East End. The dividing line ran just north of Wormwood and Camomile Streets.

  Bishopsgate Within was once carved into many small parishes, each anchored by its own church. St Andrew Undershaft, St Ethelburga Bishopsgate, St Martin Outwich, and St Mary Axe have all been absorbed over time into St Helen's Bishopsgate, the last survivor. St Helen's carries medieval funerary monuments and a stained glass window honoring William Shakespeare, who was a local parishioner in the early to mid-1590s. He worked close by, at The Theatre and the Curtain Theatre in Shoreditch.

  St Ethelburga-the-Virgin within Bishopsgate is dedicated to the sister of Earconwald himself, St Ethelburga of Barking, who was the first Abbess of Barking Abbey. The ward's churches wove together the bishop who named the gate, his saintly sister, and a playwright who would later become England's most celebrated writer.

• 4. Bishopsgate Without

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  St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate anchored the extramural half of the ward both spiritually and geographically. The church stands immediately north of where the gate once stood. Saint Botolph, a 7th-century East Anglian saint, was regarded as the patron of boundaries, trade, and travel, which is why medieval London placed three of its four Botolph churches just outside city gates.

  The ground beneath Bishopsgate Without holds some of its stranger history. Blomfield Street, on the ward's western edge, was built over part of the former River Walbrook, known at that stretch as Deepditch. That section of the river became the site of what are now called the Walbrook Skulls: a deposit of large quantities of decapitated Roman-era human skulls that are still uncovered during construction work.

  From 1247 to 1633, Bishopsgate Without was the first home of the Bethlem Royal Hospital, known to history as Bedlam. The psychiatric institution sat immediately north of St Botolph's church.

  Around 1597, the merchant Sir Paul Pindar bought up several properties and built himself a house with a narrow frontage that stretched far back from the street. Bishopsgate Street had just been paved, which suited his business dealings in East Anglia. The house became prestigious enough to host foreign ambassadors, including the Venetian ambassador Pietro Contarini in 1617-18. Contarini had mixed feelings about the neighborhood's position on London's edge, calling it "an airy and fashionable area... a little too much in the country."

  In the 1600s the area sheltered many Huguenot refugees, a large number of them weavers, alongside the neighboring districts of Bethnal Green and Spitalfields. When wealthier residents began leaving for the newly developed West End in the late 1600s, the character of the area shifted. By around 1800, a clergyman named Rev. Richardson was writing that the inhabitants of the extreme east of London knew nothing of the western localities, and that Bishopsgate Without's householders were as distinct from those of Westminster as they were from the inhabitants of Holland or Belgium.

• 5. Coaching Inns and the Road North

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  Before the railways, Bishopsgate was where Londoners set out for the north. The ward held a string of coaching inns that served passengers departing along Ermine Street: the Angel, the Black Bull, the Dolphin, the Flower Pot, the Green Dragon, the Magpie and Punchbowl, the White Hart, and the Wrestlers. All of them survived the Great Fire of London, yet all have since been demolished.

  The Black Bull had a cultural role beyond lodging travelers. In the 16th century it served as a performance venue for the Queen's Men theatrical troupe. The English politician Anthony Bacon moved nearby with his mother in May 1594, and she wrote to complain about the plays and interludes at the Bull, fearing they would corrupt her son's servants.

  Sir Paul Pindar's house, demolished in 1890 to make way for the expansion of Liverpool Street station, did not entirely disappear. Its 17th-century facade was preserved and can now be seen in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Crosby Hall, at one time the residence of both Richard III and Thomas More, was demolished and then re-erected in Chelsea in 1910. The London Tavern operated at a notable address in the ward from 1768 to 1876.

• 6. Upheaval and Displacement

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  In 1649, during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, Colonel Whalley's Regiment was stationed in Bishopsgate Ward to help defend London against Royalists. The soldiers mutinied against Parliament, driven in part by their radical Leveller sympathies. A surrender was eventually reached, but Robert Lockyer, a parishioner of Bishopsgate Without and a member of the regiment, was executed as a ringleader of what became known as the Bishopsgate mutiny.

  The Communist Manifesto was first printed in 1848, anonymously and in German, by the Workers Educational Association at 46 Liverpool Street in Bishopsgate Without.

  The arrival of Liverpool Street station transformed the neighborhood more drastically than any of these events. When the station first opened in 1874, three thousand residents of Bishopsgate Without were evicted and their homes demolished. The 1891 expansion of the station displaced around seven thousand more people in the neighboring area of Shoreditch.

  On the 24th of April 1993, an IRA truck bomb exploded in Bishopsgate. Journalist Ed Henty was killed, over forty people were injured, and the blast caused approximately one billion pounds worth of damage. St Ethelburga's church was destroyed and the NatWest Tower and Liverpool Street station both suffered damage. Police had received a coded warning but were still in the process of evacuating the area when the bomb went off. The area had already been hit by the Baltic Exchange bombing the year before. St Ethelburga's was eventually rebuilt and now operates as the home of the St Ethelburga's Centre for Reconciliation and Peace.

• 7. Politics and Boundaries

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  Bishopsgate's ward boundaries were reviewed in 1994, 2003, and 2013, fundamentally altering what had been ancient lines. The 1994 revision brought a significant portion of the Shoreditch area of the London Borough of Hackney into Bishopsgate Without. The changes in 2003 and 2013 went further, transferring nearly all of Bishopsgate Within to neighboring wards, leaving only a small area around the Leathersellers' livery hall. The ward had previously extended much further south, along Bishopsgate road and Gracechurch Street.

  Bishopsgate is one of 25 wards in the City of London, each electing an Alderman to the Court of Aldermen and Commoners to the Court of Common Council of the City of London Corporation. Eligibility to stand requires being a Freeman of the City of London.

  On the 15th of September 2022, Bishopsgate elected Kawsar Zaman as its Alderman. He became only the third non-white Alderman in the City's history, the first British-Bangladeshi ever to hold the office, and the youngest person ever elected to the Court of Aldermen. In a ward whose oldest churches carry the names of a 7th-century bishop and his sister, that election marked one of the most significant shifts in Bishopsgate's long political history.