Farringdon & Clerkenwell

Monks, then clockmakers, then printers: a district of workshops that turned into kitchens and studios.

Named after a well where the parish clerks of London performed mystery plays, first recorded in 1100 and still there under a window on Farringdon Lane. The Knights Hospitaller, the order that ran hospitals for pilgrims to Jerusalem, had their English headquarters here, and their gatehouse of 1504 still spans St John's Lane, looking like a piece of a castle dropped into a street of offices. After the monasteries went, Clerkenwell filled with trades that needed daylight and small rooms. Clockmakers and watchmakers worked in the streets around Northampton Square; printers spread up from Fleet Street; brewers, distillers and the meat market at Smithfield took the rest. From the 1850s the Italian quarter grew around Saffron Hill, which is why St Peter's Italian Church holds a procession through these streets every July. The workshops emptied in the twentieth century and were taken over by architects, designers and cooks, which is what the district is now. St John on St John Street built a whole style of British cooking out of the parts the meat market next door could not sell. Exmouth Market has a food market on weekdays; Clerkenwell Green, which has had no grass for three hundred years, has the Marx Memorial Library on it, where Lenin edited a revolutionary paper in 1902. Farringdon station, open since 1863, was one of the first stops on the first underground railway in the world.