Walking the Circle Line: Moorgate to Tower Hill
I am walking London Underground’s Circle Line. In this installment, I’ll be making the trek from Moorgate through Liverpool Street and Aldgate to Tower Hill. Armed with a 4x5 pinhole camera and a simple map, I’ll be taking photographs along the way. A pinhole camera, you may already know, is a wooden box with a tiny ‘pinhole’ sized entrance instead of a lens. There is almost nothing to it.
Previous installment: Barbican to Moorgate.
Much of the Circle Line’s route between Moorgate and Tower Hill roughly skirts the ancient London Wall, first built by the Romans around 200AD. For almost 1500 years the Wall imposed a curfew in London, with seven gates on the wall preventing entrance between dusk and dawn. The gates themselves are long gone, but they persist as roads with the same names: Moorgate, Aldgate, Bishopsgate, Cripplegate, Aldersgate, Newgate, Ludgate.
From Moorgate, the Circle Line travels under Finsbury Circus, with Salisbury House marking the entrance to the Circus.
The circle of car park spaces around Finsbury Circus are numbered in heavy white paint. f1, f2, f3 etc. I’m reminded of the famous ‘f’ stop aperture numbers of photography. Weegee’s famous ‘f8 and be there’ philosophy on how to take photographs. Ansel Adam’s Group f/64 was formed in 1932 in protest at the pictorialist trend of the time, aiming to create sharp, realist photographs. I sense he would have hated my photographs. The pinhole cameras I use operate at around f350, letting in about 1/50,000th of the light most lens are capable of.
The Circle Line briefly opens to the air outside Liverpool Street, albeit hidden behind building facades. This narrow lane is strangely named Broad Street Avenue, an eight foot wall tries to prevent anyone looking at the uncovered railway.
The circuit of the Circle Line from here to Aldgate is not the most picturesque, seemingly consisting of back alleys and access roads. A hundred yards to the north of the line is Petticoat Lane, perhaps London’s most famous street market. The same distance to the south is Houndsditch. Peter Ackroyd explains in ‘London: The Biography’ that no one quite ever recorded why Houndsditch was named as such, but in 1989 the skeletons of several ancient Romans were uncovered - along with those of their dogs. A view of the Gherkin appears, the Gherkin now sits at the heart of the City of London, orbited by the Circle Line.
At Aldgate, I venture into the nearby alleyways, and take a photograph of Saracen’s Head Yard. Ivor Hoole explains that an Inn once stood here - the Saracen’s Head. I’d never thought about it before, but Ivor eplains that the preponderance of Inns and Hotels in this area stems from the fact that throughout antiquity travellers wanted to stay just inside or outside the Wall. Nine CCTV cameras watch me taking the ten minute exposure, several security guards appear and mumble into walkie-talkies before wandering off. There is no need for a City Wall in this century, the Mayor of London refers to the thousands of CCTV cameras in the City as London’s ‘Ring of Steel’.
Finally the underground ducks below London Wall itself. Most of the wall was destroyed during the industrial revolution to make way for buildings, the few fragments that remain only do so as they were used as walls for those buildings. The wall was more than 25 feet high. The oldest bricks were laid almost 2,000 years ago. At the base here lie a dozen plastic McDonald’s cups, discarded by visitors to the nearby London Wall. It has survived much worse in the course of 1800 years.
Tower Hill sits beside the Tower of London, founded a thousand years ago on the site of an ancient Roman fort. What once was the moat is now filled with soil and turf, the strangeness of this is perhaps why I’ve never really connected well with the Tower.
