The Norwich Road: An East Anglian Highway

by Charles G. Harper

FRONT OF THE "SARACEN'S HEAD," ALDGATE: PRESENT DAY.

It is true that one might have taken coach from many other and more central inns for Colchester, Ipswich and Norwich:—from the "Spread Eagle," in Gracechurch Street, a fine old galleried inn demolished at the close of 1865; from the "Cross Keys," in the same street; from the "Swan with Two Necks," in Lad Lane, anciently Lady Lane (that is to say, the Lane of Our Lady, the Blessed Virgin), now Gresham Street; or from the "Bull," 151 Leadenhall Street, which must by no means be confounded with its namesake in Aldgate High Street. Exactly what that Leadenhall Street hostelry was like let the picture of its old galleried courtyard show.

There was also "another way" to Norwich; out of Bishopsgate, by way of Newmarket, Bury and Thetford. Taking this route, which, although 2½ miles shorter, no true sportsman considered to be the real Norwich Road, one started from the "Golden Cross," Charing Cross; from the "White Horse," in Fetter Lane (improved away in 1898); from the "Flower Pot," in Bishopsgate Street; from yet another "Bull," also in Bishopsgate Street; or from the "Bull and Mouth," St Martin's-le-Grand. But when all these places have been duly set forth, it is to Aldgate that we must turn as the real starting-point.

YARD OF THE "SARACEN'S HEAD" IN COACHING DAYS. From a Drawing by T. Hosmer Shepherd, 1854.

Aldgate in the days before railways was quite unlike the Aldgate of to-day. Certain of the old buildings remain, but the "note" of the place is entirely altered. It is now a noisy, distracting ante-room to the City, in which tinkling tram-cars and costermongers' barrows jostle with elephantine railway goods vans; where the Jewish second-hand clothes shop rubs a greasy shoulder with the "merchant tailor's" vulgar show of electric light, plate glass and wax models; and where the East End, in the person of the aproned, ringleted and ostrich-feathered factory girl, meets the West, in the shape of some City clerk strayed beyond his mercantile or financial frontiers, each regarding the other as a curiosity in these social marches. It is as the meeting of salt water and fresh, this mingling of the tides of City and East End, and to the observant not a little curious. Nothing like it—nothing so marked—is to be seen on any other of the borders of the City. There is, too, a smack of the sea, a certain air of romance, in the street, coming, perhaps, from the windows of the nautical instrument-makers, where the binoculars, the quadrants, the sextants and the sea-faring tackle in general hint of distant climes and the coral reefs of South Pacific isles.

These mariners' emporia were here and in the Minories before railways came, and so also were many fine old inns. For Aldgate, difficult though it may be to realise it to-day, was not only the place whence many of the Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk coaches set out, but was also the resting-place of travellers to London; and its inns were quite as well-appointed as those of the more central ones in the City, or those of Charing Cross, or the West End. As travellers by rail to London in modern times resort to the railway hotels, so did our great-grandfathers find rest at the coaching inns at whose thresholds they were set down at their journey's end.

YARD OF THE "SARACEN'S HEAD": PRESENT DAY.

The fragments merely of the last of Aldgate's old hostelries remain, in the bold front of Nos. 6 and 7, forming two-thirds of the old frontage of the "Saracen's Head." No. 5, the other third, has been destroyed, and so also has the old appearance of the galleried courtyard, still named "Saracen's Head Yard," but now surrounded by warehouses. The old coach archway remains, and the gables at the back of the buildings are quaint reminiscences of other times. Coaches plied between the "Saracen's Head" and Norwich so far back as 1681, and Strype, the antiquary, born in the neighbourhood, in a court whose name now flaunts the horrid travesty of "Tripe Court," referring to the inn, speaks of it as "very large and of a considerable trade." The existing fragment, with its handsome architectural elevation of richly-moulded plaster in the Renaissance style of the late seventeenth century, is part of the building mentioned by him. Small shops now occupy the ground floor, and the upper rooms are let as tenements.