The London Walker

Sometimes London shows itself best, not in its grand stately buildings, its palaces or cathedrals: but in its narrow gaps, the seams which thread between the buildings. Its passageways, its unloved alleys.

They sometimes seem dank and dodgy, festooned in graffiti, often ripe with the smell of last night’s revelry, however they can conceal a surprisingly deep history. Paths and trackways that existed long before the city ever threw its grid of streets and terraces over them. When you walk these routes, you are more often than not, walking on old lanes, droving routes, hollow-ways worn deep by feet, hooves, and cartwheels. Ancient paths lined with trees, thick with hedges of hawthorn and bramble, where lovers once met at harvest time; or down corpse roads, along which the dead were carried the long way, so spirits may lose their way home. An alley may bend, and we don’t know why, but the land remembers, the forgotten fields and pastures, the ponds, paved over but not gone.

Clerkenwell is particularly generous in this regard, an atmospheric place, strewn with secretive lanes and passages. Listen for its ghosts: the faint murmur of prayers where the old monastery stood, the whistles and cries of the drovers bringing the cattle into market, the clatter of the printers, the ticking of the clockmakers, the chanting voices of the radicals.

Even on a busy day, the streets can feel stilled. Passing one sunny evening through the old market, site of the great rebellion of 1381, I felt like I wasn’t walking alone. Is it a haunted place? Probably. But hard to say for certain. I for one have never seen anything. But there is a weight to the air, so many have walked these streets before us, it can feel tangible, their presence, their memory.

And in the alleys you feel this presence all the more. Much like doorways, they are easy to miss, which is precisely part of their charm. You got to find them, hunt them down. They slip between Clerkenwell’s better-known landmarks and streets, a reminder that these routes were never intended as destinations, instead they were shortcuts, service ways, tributaries to the wider river. Threads stitched together through the increasingly crowded city.

They also carry an abundance of incredible names. Most are rude. Shiteburn Lane, now Sherborne Lane, in the city lends memory to the cesspits once dug there. Tweezer’s Alley named for the tongs used at the blacksmiths forge which stood below the Strand. Gropec * * t Lane (name moderated for sensitive readers – but you get the gist) disappeared centuries ago, but gave a clear indication of the trade available in that little street.

Then there is Passing Alley, connecting St John’s Lane and Road, a modest gap between Clerkenwell’s buildings, that carries more history than many grander streets.

The name invites a wry smile. For generations, it has been suggested that Passing was once something altogether less polite: Pissing Alley. A practical description where for centuries most of London’s narrow lanes doubled as open drains and public conveniences. Whether true or not, the possibility says something wonderfully earthy about the city. London, until Victorian moral primness got a hold of it, was never squeamish.

Yet the alley almost certainly has nobler origins.

Long before Clerkenwell became a district of printers, watchmakers and workshops, this path marked the edge of open fields belonging to the Priory of St John. It was a medieval boundary path between fields. Pause for a moment, with the traffic whirring somewhere outside, the cities sirens, the flow of people passing, and stand there in that little alley, and think this; you are following a line that people have walked for perhaps eight hundred years.

The landscape then would have been almost unrecognisable. Beyond the priory walls stretched market gardens and fragrant lavender fields cultivated by the monks. Clerkenwell supplied herbs, flowers and medicinal plants to the City, and on warm summer days the air would have carried scents far removed from London’s modern traffic and been filled with buzzing bees. It’s a pleasing thought that beneath today’s paving stones and tarmac linger the ghosts of lavender cultivated and picked by ancient monks.

This is why Passing Alley deserves more than a glance, deserves your thoughts and rumination.

It is not spectacular. There are no postcard views, no famous monuments, no queue of tourists waiting for photographs. Instead it’s largely forgotten, yet continues in its endless use, and therefore offers something rarer in the ever changing landscape of modern London: a deep sense of continuity.

Passing through. Passing by.

Around these passages, history accumulates. This is what makes Clerkenwell so interesting. Every passage leads somewhere else, a turn down a lane can carry you from crusading knights, to Georgian musicians, from radical reformers, to plague pits, to locations for modern TV shows. Clerkenwell seems to offer it all.

Bruce Chatwin once wrote of the importance of following old tracks and Leigh Fermor understood that the smallest paths often yielded the richest stories. Clerkenwell’s passages prove the point. They are not grand routes. They are merely old ways through an old city.

Yet they continue to perform their ancient task: carrying curious walkers from one century into another.