Aldersgate Street

Map

The overlays that highlight 17th century London features are approximate and derived from Wenceslaus Hollar’s maps:

Open location in Google Maps: 51.518244, -0.096980

6 Annotations

First Reading

Pedro  •  Link

JOHN WESLEY and Aldergate Street.

The founder of Methodism was, as is well known, the son of a clergyman of the Established Church, and became such himself, attaining his thirty-fifth year without doing anything remarkable, beyond a missionary excursion to the American Indians. Being in London on the 24th of May 1738, he went, 'very unwillingly' to a meeting in Aldersgate Street where one was reading Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Romans. Listening to the reader, 'at about a quarter before nine o'clock,' light flashed upon his mind, and he was converted. Until that evening, he used to say, that although a teacher of others, he had never known what Christianity really was.

http://www.thebookofdays.com/mont…

Second Reading

Bill  •  Link

Aldersgate Street, the continuation northward of St. Martin's-le-Grand, extends from Aldersgate to the Barbican, south of Aldersgate Bars. The main entrance to the City from the north, and in early times famed for mansions and inns. A street "very spacious and long, and although the buildings are old and not uniform, yet many of them are very good and well-inhabited; and of the principal of them two are very large," wrote Seymour in 1736.
---London, Past and Present. H.B. Wheatley, 1891.

San Diego Sarah  •  Link

'We find in this interesting book [... a pamphlet printed in 1637, called The Carrier's Cosmography, or a Brief Relation of the Inns, Ordinaries, Hostelries and other Lodgings in and near London where the Carrier's Waggons, Foot posts and Higglers do usually come up, etc. John Taylor, the author of this forerunner of Bradshaw's Guide, met, like all reformers, with great opposition to his project.]:
"that the carriers of Bedford do lodge at the 'Three Horseshoes' in Aldersgate Street. They come on Thursdays." The carriers of Crawley in Bedfordshire also come on the same day. In 1653 Thursday was evidently their day for leaving London.'

http://digital.library.upenn.edu/…

San Diego Sarah  •  Link

More pictures of the old London -- i.e. the London built after the Great Fire, some of which Pepys would have known -- photographed by the Victorians before they demolished it in order to make room for their developments.

I confess to being disappointed in Shaftesbury House by Inigo Jones in Aldersgate St. Anthony Ashley-Cooper was very rich ... Inigo Jones was very talented. Why such a boring building??? Maybe the inside was more inspired.

https://spitalfieldslife.com/2020…

Log in to post an annotation.

If you don't have an account, then register here.

References

Chart showing the number of references in each month of the diary’s entries.

1661

1664

1667

1668