From Steam to Brutalism: Farringdon to Barbican Walk
A short stroll through medieval markets, Victorian alleys, and centuries of City history
London · 6 stops · 0.8 km · ~30 min · 17 min audio · Generated · Free to listen
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1. Farringdon Station
Farringdon Station, Cowcross Street, London EC1M 6BY, UK
Photo: Google
You are standing at the birthplace of the world's underground railway revolution. This is Farringdon Station, Cowcross Street... and on the tenth of January, eighteen sixty-three, the very first underground passenger train arrived right here. Think about that. Thirty-eight thousand people rode the line on its opening day alone! Gas-lit wooden carriages, hauled by belching steam locomotives, rumbling through tunnels beneath the streets of London. The Times called it "the great engineering triumph of the day."
But here's what most people don't know. The man who made it all possible... never got to see it. Charles Pearson, Solicitor to the City of London, had been championing this wild idea since eighteen forty-five. He called it "trains in drains." For nearly twenty years, he fought sceptics, raised funds, and navigated parliament. He even brokered a clever deal where the City bought one hundred seventy-nine thousand pounds worth of land for the railway, while the railway company purchased two hundred thousand pounds in City shares. But Pearson died of dropsy on the fourteenth of September, eighteen sixty-two... just four months before his dream came to life. The night before the public opening, the station was transformed into a nine-hundred-foot-long banquet hall, where some six hundred guests feasted in celebration. Prime Minister Lord Palmerston... declined his invitation. His excuse? At seventy-nine years old, he said he preferred to stay above ground as long as he could. Now, look up at the façade above you. You can still read the old name carved in stone: "Farringdon and High Holborn." That's from nineteen twenty-two, when the architect Charles Walter Clark rebuilt this entrance. The station has actually had three different names. It started as Farringdon Street in eighteen sixty-three, became Farringdon and High Holborn in nineteen twenty-two, and finally just Farringdon in nineteen thirty-six. And here's one more secret. This station wasn't just built for people. It was built in conjunction with a freight depot to deliver livestock directly to the slaughterhouses supplying Smithfield Market, just to the south-east. Cattle were transported underground by rail and walked up ramps to meet their fate. You can still find remains of those cattle ramps on West Smithfield, if you know where to look. From carrying cattle to carrying Crossrail passengers ninety feet underground... Farringdon has been reinventing itself for over a hundred and sixty years. And it all started right beneath your feet.
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2. Faulkner's Alley
Faulkner's Alley (running north off Cowcross Street), London EC1M 6DQ, UK
Look closely at this narrow, iron-gated passageway. This is Faulkner's Alley, a rare survivor from a hidden, labyrinthine London that has almost entirely vanished.
In the nineteenth century, Cowcross Street and the surrounding courts formed one of the city's most notorious slums.
Densely packed tenements squeezed together along footpaths barely wide enough for two people to pass. Rainwater and waste ran down the cobblestones, while local slaughterhouses and gin distilleries filled the air with overwhelming fumes. Writers like Charles Dickens drew inspiration from these dark, claustrophobic rookeries.
When the Metropolitan Railway cut through Farringdon in the eighteen-sixties, whole swathes of these impoverished alleyways were bulldozed out of existence. Yet Faulkner's Alley somehow endured, preserving an original footprint that traces back at least to the seventeenth century. Why the name Faulkner's Alley?
Local history suggests it was once home to royal falconers, back when open fields lay just beyond the old city walls. Later, it echoed with the cries of costermongers, street traders, and factory workers navigating the shadowy passage between Cowcross Street and Benjamin Street.
Today, locked behind iron gates, the alley remains a silent time capsule, frozen in place while modern London rushes past outside.
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3. Greenhill Rents
Greenhill Rents (branching north off Cowcross Street), London EC1M 6BN, UK
Step into this narrow, paved nook known as Greenhill Rents. Today it feels like a quiet, secluded pocket off Cowcross Street, but back in the eighteenth century, this alley echoed with absolute mayhem. The land was laid out in seventeen thirty-three by a merchant named John Greenhill. In Georgian London, the word rents referred to speculative housing built specifically to collect rent from local workers and tradesmen.
Because Cowcross Street was the primary route into Smithfield Market, this nook quickly became vital to the livestock trade. Before being driven into the market rings, hundreds of mud-spattered cattle were funneled into tight holding pens right here. Drovers wrestled bellowing cows through the narrow entrance, keeping them penned overnight while butchers prepared their bids.
When the live animal market relocated in eighteen fifty-five, Greenhill Rents pivoted to meat processing and bacon curing. Enormous brick smokeries were constructed behind these walls, with towering stoves rising up to sixty feet high to smoke bacon over oak sawdust.
If you glance towards the four-storey Victorian warehouse at the end of the alley, you can still spot its original iron hoist crane hanging over the loft doors!
What was once a roaring, smoke-filled livestock yard is now one of Clerkenwell’s most peaceful hidden historic pockets.
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4. The Fox & Anchor
115 Charterhouse Street, Barbican, London EC1M 6AA, UK
Take a look at this building... really look at it. Those swirling green and white tiles, those peacocks facing each other on the frieze, the griffins jutting out above the windows. This is the Fox and Anchor, a Grade Two listed public house at one hundred and fifteen charter-house Street. It was designed by architect Laythum Withall and built in eighteen ninety-eight by W. H. Lassells and Company. But here's what makes this façade truly special. The architectural ceramics were designed by William James Neatby, the chief designer at Doulton and Company... the same man who created the famous Meat Hall ceiling inside Harrods in Knights-bridge. Neatby preferred to use Carrara ware tiles for exteriors, but a notable exception where he used it in an interior was that very Meat Hall at Harrods. So look up at those green faience tiles and know... the same hands that decorated one of London's most luxurious department stores also adorned this humble pub for butchers. And why was there a pub here at all? Smithfield was almost a city within a city, and one with its own hours. To give customers time to buy and prepare their meat for sale the same day, the market opened at night. Workers finished their shifts in the early morning. Many headed to "early houses," pubs which opened early for workers. At the start of the twentieth century, all pubs were permitted to open at six in the morning, but this ended with the Defence of the Realm Act of nineteen fourteen. The first major effort to restrict opening hours came during World War One. Keeping workers off the sauce was better for the war effort, the government determined, plus it saved grain. But an exception was made for market pubs, which were seen as key to market trading... buyers and sellers would negotiate deals in the pub, and then drink to seal it. The men who drank here at dawn had extraordinary titles. You might be a puller-back, a pitcher, a shunter, a shopman... or a bummaree. The bummarees pulled the barrows and trays of meat for the traders in the market. All porters were licensed by the City of London Corporation and issued with an identifying arm badge, which they wore with their traditional blue overalls and white caps. It was a tight-knit community, full of tradition, with generations of the same families working in the same place. Until nineteen ninety-six, the market was heavily unionised and there were strict job divisions. A humper could not do the work of a puller-back. If anyone dared cross those lines, the whistle blew and all work stopped. Today, just two pubs in London still use their early licenses... the Market Porter by Borough Market, and this very pub, the Fox and Anchor. It opens at seven in the morning, Monday to Friday. Step inside and you'll find black and white prints of erstwhile butchers as a nod to its roots... and if you look carefully at the back, three tiny snugs or booths, each slightly different, created by remodelling the back of the pub... including what used to be the gents. One more thing. This pretty Art Nouveau pub sits on the edge of a Black Death plague pit. Smithfield's history stretches back over eight hundred years... a place of livestock markets, public executions, and even the site where rebel Wat Tyler met King Richard the Second in thirteen eighty-one. Layer upon layer of London, right beneath your feet.
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5. The Charterhouse
Charterhouse Square, Barbican, London EC1M 6AN, UK
You are standing on ground that holds one of London's darkest and most layered secrets. Beneath the peaceful green of Charterhouse Square lie the remains of thousands... victims of the Black Death. In thirteen forty-eight, as plague ravaged the city and claimed an estimated sixty percent of London's population, a knight named Sir Walter Manny leased this land as an emergency burial ground. It is thought that as many as fifty thousand bodies were buried here. In twenty thirteen, Crossrail excavations uncovered twenty-five skeletons in just one small corner of the square... and DNA analysis confirmed the presence of Yersinia Pestis, the bacterium that causes the plague. But from death came devotion. In thirteen seventy-one, Sir Walter Manny founded a Carthusian monastery right here, on the edge of the burial ground. Its official name? "The House of the Salutation of the Mother of God." Twenty-five monks lived in near total silence, each in his own small dwelling with a private garden. Their meals, entirely meat-free, were passed through a hatch in the cell door. Even a young Thomas more came here for spiritual retreat... before choosing a life in politics instead. Then came Henry the Eighth. When the monks refused to accept the King as Supreme Head of the Church, Henry made a brutal example of them. Prior John Houghton was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn in May fifteen thirty-five... and then, in a chilling act of intimidation, his severed hand was nailed to the Charterhouse door. Eighteen monks in all were killed. Some were starved to death in Newgate Prison. One, Sebastion Newdigate, was a personal friend of the King. Henry himself visited him twice in prison to persuade him to give in... but Newdigate refused and went to his death. After the monastery fell, the buildings had an unlikely chapter. Henry's court musicians, the Bassano family from Venice, moved into the old monks' cells. A recorder they crafted here was later found in the wreck of the Mary Rose! By fifteen fifty-eight, the site had become a Tudor mansion grand enough for royalty. Elizabeth the First stayed for five days before her coronation, holding her very first Privy Council in the Great Chamber. And then, espionage! When Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, owned the house, agents discovered a Ciphered letter from Mary Queen of Scots hidden under a Doormat... sealing his fate. Finally, in sixteen eleven, a man named Thomas Sutton, called the wealthiest commoner in England, bought the estate and transformed it into a school and an almshouse for, as his will stated, "gentlemen fallen into poverty, soldiers maimed by sea or land, merchants ruined by shipwreck." That almshouse is still here today. Around forty residents, called Brothers, live within these walls... making the Charterhouse one of the oldest continuously inhabited sites in all of London.
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6. Barbican Station
Aldersgate Street, Barbican, London EC1A 4JA, UK
Standing here on Aldersgate Street outside Barbican Station, you are looking down into one of London's most remarkable architectural crossroads. Look past the entrance into the open trench below, where steel tracks slice through deep brick walls. When this station opened on December twenty-third, eighteen sixty-five, it was called Aldersgate Street, built as an extension of the world's very first underground railway, the Metropolitan Railway. Yet long before locomotives arrived, this exact ground was defined by an ancient boundary: the stone wall of Roman Londinium.
Have you ever noticed how the station feels less like a typical tube stop and more like a sunken gorge? That is because engineers used the cut-and-cover method, excavating a deep trench straight through the historical city grid. To build the original ticket hall, workers demolished a building at number one hundred thirty-four Aldersgate Street. For decades, that house had displayed a famous sign proudly claiming William Shakespeare had lived there. Though historians later disproved the tale, the story remains a cherished piece of street lore.
As traffic grew, extra tracks known as the City Widened Lines were added beside the tube line. Steam engines chugged through night after night, hauling goods and livestock straight into underground sidings bound for nearby Smithfield Meat Market. By day, commuter trains roared under a magnificent glass arch that spanned eighty feet across the open cutting.
Everything changed on December twenty-ninth, nineteen forty, during the Blitz. Incendiary bombs rained down on Aldersgate, triggering devastating firestorms that flattened the surrounding district. The upper station building collapsed, and the glass roof was shattered.
The ruined glass canopy was finally taken down in nineteen fifty-five. Its loss inspired Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman to write a mournful tribute titled "Monody on the Death of Aldersgate Street Station". But from the ashes of devastation, a visionary rebuilding project was born: the Barbican Estate, a concrete utopian fortress of elevated walkways and hidden gardens.
Today, three distinct eras sit stacked directly on top of each other. Ancient Roman ruins rest beside Victorian railway cuttings, all framed by towering twentieth-century Brutalism. Renamed Barbican in nineteen sixty-eight, this unassuming entrance bridges two thousand years of history.
