Nestled just to the north-west of the City of London, Clerkenwell is an area rich in layers of social, religious, and industrial history. Though now buzzing with restaurants, media offices, and modern housing, its streets whisper the stories of monastic orders, radical reformers, Victorian paupers, printers, watchmakers, and revolutionaries.
Our walk begins at Farringdon Station, one of the world’s oldest underground railway stations (opened in 1863), and meanders through Clerkenwell’s lanes and squares, uncovering the area’s deeply rooted social past.
Cowcross Street & St John Street: Markets and Migration
Emerging from Farringdon Station, we find ourselves on Cowcross Street, historically a route used to drive cattle to Smithfield Market. This area was long associated with housing for the working classes from the 17th Century onwards and during the 19th Century, due to the growth of the population caused by the Industrial Revolution, was home to one of London’s worst slums or “rookeries” as they were known.
Walking north from here, is St John Street. It was part of the ancient route to the north known as the Great North Road. Because of the heavy traffic its coaching inns and taverns bustled with travellers and merchants.
St John’s Lane, St John’s Gate & St John’s Square: The Knights and the Printers
Turning into St John’s Lane, we walk into the heart of medieval Clerkenwell. Here stands St John’s Gate, once the south entrance to the priory of the Knights of the Order of St John of Jerusalem, a monastic and military order formed in the 11th century. The priory was one of the wealthiest religious houses in England before the Reformation dissolved it under Henry VIII.
By the 18th century, St John’s Gate had become a centre for print and journalism. It was the office of The Gentleman’s Magazine, edited by Edward Cave and visited by Samuel Johnson, who penned some of his work here. Across the road lies St John’s Square, once the priory’s cloister, later a place of commerce and manufacture. Over centuries, this square bore witness to the shift from its monastic beginning to a bustling industrial area.
Briset Street & Britton Street: Dwellings of the Industrious
Nearby Briset Street and Britton Street speak to Clerkenwell’s transformation during the Industrial Revolution. These narrow lanes were home to working-class Londoners and small workshops. The rise of printing, metalworking, and watchmaking here was fueled by the availability of cheap labour and proximity to the city. Buildings here housed not just families but also presses and lathes, often in the same room.
Clerkenwell Green: The Radical Heart
Clerkenwell Green is the symbolic heart of the area. In the 19th century, when Clerkenwell had become heavily industrialised, overpopulated and poor, it was a hotbed of political radicalism. Open air meetings were held here by Chartists, radicals, socialists and supporters of Irish Home Rule. The Marx Memorial Library, housed in a former Welsh school on the Green, commemorates this tradition, marking Clerkenwell as a key site in the international socialist movement. Lenin worked in the building briefly during his exile in London, publishing the revolutionary newspaper Iskra in 1902.
St James’s Church & Clerkenwell Close: Faith and Community
Overlooking the Green is St James’s Church, built in the 1790s on the site of a medieval nunnery. For centuries, the church represented the parochial side of Clerkenwell life. Baptisms, marriages, and burials recorded here trace the genealogies of working families who called Clerkenwell home across generations.
The Close, filled with beautiful aristocratic houses during the 16th and 17th Century, later saw the establishment of many craft industries. In the 18th and 19th Century clockmakers, jewellers moved here and opened new characteristic workshops at the top of the buildings for better lighting, indispensable for the craft.
Nearby Sans Walk, St James Walk, and Sekforde Street formed the grid of streets that would, in the Victorian period, house both the poor and a growing middle class.
Woodbridge Street, Corporation Row & Rosoman Street: Institutions and Improvements
Woodbridge Street and Corporation Row were once dominated by charitable institutions and a workhouse. The Clerkenwell Workhouse stood here, infamous for its harsh conditions, before being replaced by the Clerkenwell House of Detention, a prison that held both common criminals and political prisoners.
Rosoman Street bordered Spa Fields, a once-pleasure garden that became notorious for mass meetings of radicals. In 1816, a riot erupted here as unemployed veterans and workers demanded reform, an event that presaged Peterloo and the broader movement for electoral change.
New River Head & the Valley of the River Fleet: Water and Waste
Our walk ends at New River Head, where clean water first flowed into London in the early 17th century from the Hertfordshire hills via the New River, a pioneering civil engineering project. This vital source of fresh water marked Clerkenwell as crucial to London’s urban health and development.
Beneath much of our route flows the River Fleet, now hidden underground. Once an open stream that gave life to tanneries, breweries, and distilleries, it eventually became a polluted sewer by the 19th century—a grim reminder of the environmental cost of urban growth.
Clerkenwell is a place where medieval priors, radical printers, Victorian paupers, and modern creatives all left their trace. Every alley and square speaks of many stories: of struggle and survival, of power and protest, and above all, of the people who made this part of London their home throughout the centuries.
Clerkenwell’s past is always present.
If you want to learn more about it, join me on one of our upcoming walks.