London’s Roman City Wall: The Obscured – Part 08
Wormwood Street

Introduction

This post is the eighth in a series, which is aimed at documenting all the surviving sections of the Roman city wall, and will focus on part of the northern section of the wall which stretches from Bishopsgate in the east, to the Barbican Estate in the west, where it would have met with the existing walls of the earlier Roman garrison.

As is shown in the map below, the line of this part of the wall can be partially traced in the modern city today by following route of its namesake, the street appropriately named London Wall. The green lines on the map represents the walls of the earlier Roman garrison.

As this northern section of the wall is rather long, I will deal with it in several segments with this post focusing on the section along Wormword Street between Bishopsgate and Old Broad Street.

• Part 8 – Wormwood Street
• Part 9 – London Wall: Old Broad Street to Blomfield Street (Coming soon)
• Part 10 – London Wall: Blomfield Street to Moorgate (Coming soon)
• Part 11 – Moorgate to St Alphage Church Tower (Coming soon)

The Roman city wall of London dates back to the 2nd century CE and was a significant feature of The City for over 1500 years. When it finally ceased to be useful as a defensive structure from the 18th century, the gateways were demolished and wall became consumed by the development of roads and buildings which has taken place over the last 300 years to the point where little evidence remains of the wall above ground today.

However, the remains of the wall are often hidden and not entirely lost, and so as is often the case, surprises often await the curious.

Wormwood Street

Starting from Bishopsgate and heading west, the line of the Roman Wall forms the rear building line of the properties along the north side of Wormwood Street, a short and busy thoroughfare between Bishopsgate and Old Broad Street.

The street is named after the medical herb: Wormwood (Artemisia absinthium), which once grew amongst the stone ruins of the Roman London in this area. Coincidentally, the neighbouring street on the other side of Bishopsgate is called Camomile Street, also after herbal plants that grew there.

Wormwood Street, is first recorded in name on Ogilby and Morgan’s map of London from 1676, shown above, but is certainly many centuries older than that. It is shown, but not named, on the earliest map of the City of London, the Copperplate map of 1557-9 and also the Agas map of 1561. As can be seen on the map above, the street runs parallel to the City Wall which is delineated by the dark feature running across the map.

The modern Wormwood Street is described by Pevsner as a “bleak traffic artery”, but it was not always so. It was during the 1970s that the road was widened to the south to create the dual carriage-way of the inner ring road, which necessitated the total loss of the buildings on that side of the road.

The whole of the south side of the street was then taken up by the pedestal of the 26 storey tower of 99 Bishopsgate from 1976, originally for HSBC by GMW Architects. This tower remains today, but has had a tough life. Being twice severely damaged by the IRA bombs at the Baltic Exchange in April 1992 and worse still by the Bishopsgate bomb in April 1993 which exploded directly opposite the entrance to this building. The whole building was extensively repaired following these events, with a further refurbishment in 2006, and again in 2012 to its current form including a new entrance facade and reception.

The north side of Wormwood Street remained a mix of individual four storey buildings of various ages until the 1990s. After the damage caused by the Bishopsgate bomb, all but two of the pre-1970s buildings were rebuilt.

The current building on the corner of Bishopsgate and Wormwood Street is 21 Wormwood Street / 105-107 Bishopsgate and has a Boots Optician on the ground floor as can be seen above.

This building was redeveloped and extended in 1995-7 by Fitzroy’s as a result of the damage sustained from the aforementioned Bishopsgate bomb. There are six storeys facing Bishopsgate, stepping down to four on the extension along Wormwood Street in order to provide a consistent roof line.

The curved corner profile is inherited from its predecessor, a 1950s office building (which can be seen in the bomb damage photograph), the framework of which was reused as part of the reconstruction.

Another element transferred from the previous building, although slightly re-positioned, is the bronze coloured bishop’s mitre positioned on the first floor wall. This can just be seen to the far right in both the photographs above, and in detail below. On the 1950s building there was also a commemorative plaque situated beneath the Mitre explaining its significance.

The mitre is in commemoration of the Bishop’s Gate, a 7th century gateway, built by Eorconweold an early Bishop of London, on the site of one of the original Roman entrances into Londinium. The Bishop’s Gate is the origin of the name of later gateways here and to the streets passing north / south through it.

The present Mitre was also one of a pair, with the other situated on the opposite side of Bishopsgate, on the wall of Bishops House, which stood from 1976 until its demolition in 2007 where the Heron Tower rises today.

Continuing west, Nos. 22-24 Wormwood Street or “City Wall House” (also confusingly referenced as 10 Wormwood Street) shown centre-right in the photo above with the blue shop signs. It is a symmetrical building of brick with grey metal clad details and pavilion sections, built in the mid 1990s as apartments, with ground floor retail units for Goldcrest Homes. It replaced two earlier buildings damaged by the Bishopsgate bomb.

The facade is divided into separate sections to retain the impression of being several smaller buildings, which continues the rhythm of the street and blends with earlier neighbouring buildings.

Just to the left of centre in the photograph above, are the oldest two surviving buildings of Wormwood Street. That on the left, No. 26 (barber shop), is a modest Georgian house, the last remaining of a terrace of six built in 1771-1772. On the right No 25, (with the green shop front) is a grander Victorian building of 1889, designed by Joseph & Smithem, and fronted in shallow carved panels of Bath stone.

“Broad Street House” takes up the remainder of the north side Wormwood Street. This large L-shaped office block also fronts Old Broad Street towards Liverpool Street.

Broad Street House was designed by Ley, Colbeck and Partners and built 1972-77. It has a concrete slab and smoked glass curtain wall tower of eleven storeys facing Wormwood Street, with an adjoining two story slab and smoked glass section facing Old Broad Street. Both of which sit on an expansive two storey podium of polished brown granite.

The podium once formed part of the City’s high-walks or pedways from Liverpool Street to Leadenhall Street. The bridge across Wormwood Street is one of the last remaining elements of this highwalk and will likely be removed at some point, but for the fact it also provides the fire escape route for the occupants of Broad Street House.

Since 2018, the bridge has played host to one of the Sculpture In The City installations: Bridging Home by Do Ho Suh which features a scale model of a traditional Korean house as if dropped onto the bridge. It was meant to be just a temporary installation, but is now likely to remain at least until May 2022.

Broad Street House also includes The Kings Arms public house at 27-28 Wormwood Street, which has been sited here since 1769. An information panel on the history of area of Bishopsgate is presented on the wall of the pub along Wormwood Street.

Traces of the Wall

As can be seen on the Ogilby and Morgan map of 1676, at the top of this post, the City wall was built up against and incorporated into the structures of the properties on the north side of Wormwood Street. The north / outer face of the wall remained mostly clear from other structures here as it bordered the churchyard of St Botolph without Bishopsgate.

As was typical, after the wholesale demolition of the city gates in late 18th century, the redundant city wall would have been quickly consumed or demolished by subsequent building works.

The artist John Wykeham Archer captured possibly the last above ground remnant of the wall at Wormwood Street in the early 19th century. The drawing shows the typical red-tiled bonding courses of the original Roman elements of the wall, with later more random stone work typical of the medieval construction methods above.

My usual source of reference, The Royal Commission of Historic Monuments of England: London: Volume 3 from 1928 is unusually lacking on information of the remains of the City Walls on Wormwood Street, with a notable gap in reports from Camomile Street until All-Hallows church.

There have been various small recordings of the Roman gate house and later remains of the The Bishops Gate, but no wholesale excavation has been done of this site. I will record the details of these findings in a separate post on The Bishop’s Gate.

The most recent archaeological studies in Wormwood Street are from the mid 1990s, and relate to the redevelopment of the properties at Nos. 20-21 and 22-24 following their demolition due to the structural damages caused by the Bishopsgate bomb.

At Nos. 21-22 Wormwood Street and 105-107, in 1994, the Roman city wall was found to have been entirely removed with no structural elements remaining. The archaeological evaluation report mentions the City wall had been completely removed and a post-medieval wall of reused ragstone had replaced it, on the same alignment, and formed the exterior of the north wall of the basement at no. 21. Stone and tiles, identified as coming from the Roman City wall, were recovered from secondary contexts at this site.

Surviving sections of the Roman City wall were found at Nos. 22-24 Wormwood Street as shown above in 1994. It is described in the site report as surviving to its full width of about 2.5m along the north side of the site. The original base of the Roman wall was at half the height of the basement, which is much shallower than other sites. The wall had been refaced internally by 19th century brick-work. In addition, two Roman wells and a Roman rubbish pit were also found during the investigations here at this cramped site.

Looking at how narrow these plots are, and with City wall occupying approximately one third of the basement area, and being only to a depth of just over 1 metre (3ft) it is perhaps understandable that historic property developers owners would have chosen to reclaim that space from the redundant walls after late 18th century.

There is nothing of the City Wall visible externally at these sites, but the line of the wall forms a distinct building line for these properties where the rear walls are recorded as sitting on the structural remains of the wall.

The space between the rear of the Wormwood Street properties and the Tennis Courts of St Botolph’s Churchyard as seen above, was subject to an archaeological investigation by John Schofield in 1977 when it was suggested that it may contain the location of bastion 10a, a previously unknown 4th century roman bastion. Due to copies of the 1558 Copperplate map of London only being published from 1966, this illustrative evidence of a bastion had been missed by the Royal Commission for Historic Monuments of 1928, and other archaeologists up to this time.

A geophysical survey was carried out, but the results where not wholly conclusive. But based on the recorded anomalies, and the regular spacing of the other known bastions of the eastern sector, it was surmised that there is likely a bastion here as the Copperplate maps suggests

Lastly, I had hoped the development of Broad Street House in the 1970s which sits directly on the line of the wall would have produced recorded evidence of the wall. However, so far this location has proved a black hole of information, and I can find literally nothing online about the construction of that building, or even what preceded it.

The early 1970s were a particularly busy time for construction in the City, and the newly formed MoLAS may have simply been too stretched to monitor that site. There appears to be no archaeological records available for this location from the usual sources. I am trying to contact the original architects, City of London Planning and MOLA to see if can find any further information.

Conclusion

So in conclusion, despite the line of the wall being well known and easily traceable here at Wormwood Street, unfortunately no visible sections of Roman Wall remain here, obscured or otherwise.

The superstructure of the wall survives only at 22-24 Wormwood Street and is recorded as a Scheduled Ancient Monument, and is incorporated into the rear basement walls of that building. After careful consideration, it was not thought beneficial to expose the internal face of the wall in these basements due to the damage that removing the brick and cement facing would likely have caused.

The lack of historic recorded information about the discovery and destruction of the wall here is unusual. This suggests much of the City wall above and below ground-level had been demolished soon after the wall became redundant in the late 18th century and early 19th century, after which better recordings of the discovery of Roman antiquities in London start to appear.

The “black hole” of online information relating to Broad Street House continues to frustrate me. I will persevere with my research to find out what I can about the history of this site, and will publish any relevant findings as future posts on this blog.

Primary References

• London: City of London v. 1 (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England)
  The ever useful Pevsner Guide.
• Historic England: London Wall: remains of Roman and medieval wall from W end of All Hallows Church to 38 Camomile Street
  Historic England: Detailed record of this Scheduled Monument.
• Archaeological Data Services records
  • Wormwood Street (20-21), London EC2: Evaluation
  • Wormwood Street (Nos 20-21), EC2 {Roman City wall demolition rubble}
  • 22-24 Wormwood Street, EC2: Excavation and watching brief