ARCH OF BLACKFRIARS PRIORY, REVEALED BY THE DEMOLITION OF A BUILDING IN IRELAND YARD, MAY 1900
Thirdly, many trades are localised by the names of streets or places. Thus there are Milk Street, Ironmonger Lane, Wood Street, Honey Lane, Bread Street, Old Fish Street, Garlick Hithe, Silver Street, Paternoster Row, Budge Row.
The great houses, which formerly stood along the river between Blackfriars and Westminster, have given their names to the streets running north and south of the Strand.
Some of the streets preserve the memory of churches long since destroyed and not rebuilt, or of Monastic Houses, such as Pancras Lane, Size Lane (where was the church of St. Osyth), Great St. Thomas Apostle, Trinity Lane, Botolph Lane (where stood the fourth church of St. Botolph at the River Gate of the City), Austin Friars, Black Friars, Crutched Friars, Minories, St. Helen’s, St. Martin le Grand, St. Mary Axe, Mincing Lane, College Street, Rood Lane, Laurence Pounteney.
The names of the Gates are preserved in the streets which run through them: Aldgate, Aldersgate, Bishopsgate, Dowgate, Ludgate, Moorgate, Newgate. Other names indicate ancient sites which would otherwise have been forgotten: London Wall, Fore Street, Galley Wharf, Fleet, Thames, Walbrook, Lombard Street, Old Bailey, Playhouse Yard, Jewry.
A great many of the names are the ancient Saxon names still unchanged, while others remain in altered forms. Thus we have the names of Watling, Portsoken, Cripplegate, Hithe, in Queenhithe and Garlickhithe, Coleman Street, Chepe, Size Lane, Aldermanbury, Addle Street, Lambeth Hill.
The old Bars or Boundaries of the City jurisdiction are now all gone and, with the exception of Temple Bar, are clean forgotten. Queen Hithe preserves the memory of Queen Eleanor its owner. The site of Paul’s Cross is carefully laid down; Bucklersbury stands on the site of the family estate of the Bukerels. Outside the City wall in the vast wilderness of streets there are a few, as at Westminster, Southwark, Whitechapel, Clerkenwell, and the part which has contained the town houses of families of position for two hundred years, where there are histories and persons commemorated in the names of streets, but, as a general rule, the names have neither any significance worthy of note, nor any historical character, and there is not any reason at all why they should be painted up at the corners of the streets.