What's the Oldest Place in London?
A question with many answers...
Welcome to Londonist: Time Machine — the Substack for anyone who’s curious about London history.
Today’s ponder point: what’s the oldest place in London? It’s a question that turns out to have many answers, depending on interpretation, and on how much reliability you care to place on prehistoric guesswork. Stick around till the end, because I also go in search of London’s newest place names and — this being a time machine — future place names.
The streets of London are paved with old
The Square Mile, for all its shiny prismatic sky-clutter, is still an old town at heart. Turn a corner and you might find a kinked and cobbled lane that Dickens would have recognised, or a churchyard remnant where Chaucer once wept. Old London lives on within the Cornhill reticulum; it pervades the alleys north of Fleet Street and the curious Cromwellian crook of Austin Friars. Find a lonely street by the Thames on a damp winter weekend, and the bygone centuries feel somehow palpable — even to a level-headed science grad like myself.
The City’s history shines through, despite the 21st century packaging. Part of the reason, I think, is because so much of the medieval street-plan is still intact. We can stroll along Cheapside today just as 50 generations of Londoners did before us. Turn up Foster Lane or down Bread Street and you tread the same byways as the turbulent toddler Thomas Becket, who grew up around here in the early 12th century. Dozens of roads — perhaps a hundred — survive today in configurations that would be familiar to that future Archbishop. And this despite the Great Fire, the Blitz and the post-war planners.
The modern City is built on a medieval chassis. But some parts are older still. This area was first settled by the Romans more than a thousand years before Becket’s time. It was they who built the walls and the gates. Much of the Roman street pattern was overwritten by the Anglo-Saxons, but the bits around the edges still reflect Roman choices. Ludgate Hill, Newgate Street, Aldersgate Street, Bishopsgate and Aldgate all follow Roman routes into the City, as dictated by the locations of the gates. Further, the thoroughfares that run parallel to the wall, such as Bevis Marks, Noble Street and London Wall itself, also have Roman origins.
Beyond the Square Mile, the old Roman roads are even more assertive. Just look for the straight lines on a map. Perhaps the best known is what we now call Edgware Road. It still marches arrow-straight to the north-west, just as when the Romans paced it out nearly 2,000 years ago. The same is true of the road to Tottenham, which leaves Bishopsgate to shoot straight up through Shoreditch, Dalston and Stoke Newington. To the south, we find the Old Kent Road, Kensington Park Road, Clapham Road and Brixton Hill, all on the same alignments known to Claudius. Oxford Street of Roman provenance, as are Holborn, Fleet Street and Strand. Borough High Street, leading to the earliest London Bridge, was a very important early line of communication. Old Street very much lives up to its name. In short, many of the key routes on the modern London street atlas were established before Christianity had reached these shores.
Some of these routes predate even the Romans. The invading legions found a network of grassy trackways, which the Britons had maintained for centuries. Some of these prehistoric routes were upgraded to paved roads. Watling Street, for example, is thought to follow an earlier track from the Kentish coast to the Thames. Old Kent Road really is the old Kent road.
Almost all of this unrecorded road system is lost to time, but occasionally archaeologists find hints. One small section of a timber trackway was uncovered beside Belmarsh Prison in south-east London in 2009. Radiocarbon dating shows it to be around 6,000 years old. Another wooden track, almost as old, was found near Silvertown. Both served as boardwalks across marshy ground. They might be considered among London’s oldest known paths, if not roads.
Isn’t it Brythonic, don’t ya think?
The streets of London go back centuries, and some lead into the murk of prehistory. But their names are not so ancient. The folksy labels we apply to Roman routes today — Watling Street, Ermine Street, Stane Street, etc. — are all later, medieval terms. They would have meant nothing to the Romans, who favoured more practical terms like “the road to Dover”.
The Anglo-Saxons, who came to Britain after the Roman withdrawal, made up their own appelations, both for the roads and for the towns. Thanks to this change of tongue, we no longer go on day trips to Camulodunum, Verulalamium, Eboracum, Durovernum or Noviomagus, but instead head to Colchester, St Albans, York, Canterbury or Chichester1. Very few Roman names live on. London — a corruption of Londinium — is rare in this respect.
In some parts of the south-east we can, however, still hear a muffled echo from an earlier age. Before the Romans, Celtic people roamed these lands. They spoke a British Celtic or Brythonic language akin to modern Welsh. Kent, alone among the counties, seems to get its name from this tongue. It is first recorded as early as the 4th century BC, when the Greek voyager Pytheas supposedly sailed right around Britain, and encountered the people of ‘Kantion’, usually assumed to be Kent. The name may be an ancient Celtic term for ‘corner land’ or ‘coastal land’. The Romans would later call this territory Cantium, which passed to the Anglo-Saxons as Cent. Kent therefore has a strong claim as the oldest continually used place name in England.
Rivers often flow through history under persistent names. The Thames itself is thought to bear a Brythonic name. It is first recorded (by the Romans) as Tamesis, which is reminiscent of Welsh and Irish words for darkness. It was the dark river.
West London’s River Brent has a similarly prehistoric name. The town of Brentford is recorded in 705 as Breġuntford, thought to derive from the Celtic goddess Brigantia. This pagan deity also gave her name to the London Borough of Brent and, ultimately, Brent Cross Shopping Centre. It is, you have to admit, an unlikely temple:
London contains one other place name that predates the Romans. It is Penge.
The south London suburb has a most unusual sound to it. I’m guessing that you just said it out loud, or at least rolled it around in your head. It’s one of those words like Strood or Wazzbaffle that simply demands enunciation. Its novelty may be a symptom of unusual roots, because this is once again a word of Brythonic origin. It is first recorded in Anglo-Saxon times as Pænge or Penceat. These forms derive, it is supposed, from an earlier Celtic phrase meaning ‘edge of the wood’. That wood, known as the Great North Wood, still survives in clumps around nearby Sydenham and (the telltale) Norwood.
London’s oldest settlements
So far, we’ve dealt only with words. What of the ancient settlements whose names are unknown? As already noted, the Square Mile and parts of Borough are the oldest built-up areas in central London. Both were established by the Romans some time after AD 43. But the London region teemed with human activity long before that. Prehistoric flints, tools and weapons have been found all over the place, along with pre-Roman treasures such as the Battersea Shield and Waterloo helmet. Timbers dating from 7,000 years ago still stick out of the Thames mud at Vauxhall, and represent the oldest known structure in London. For all that, archaeologists have yet to find evidence for settled communities within the central area; not until the Romans arrive.
Head out of centre, though, and we find numerous places where humans gathered before the Romans came. Members of Wimbledon golf course will be familiar with this. They must negotiate a series of banks known as Caesar’s Camp. The name is anachronistic, as the site is really the remains of an Iron Age hill fort. Epping Forest, meanwhile, contains the remnants of two such forts, known as Ambresbury Bank and Loughton Camp. Over to the east, the land between the River Roding and Ilford Lane was once the scene of the first- and second-century BC Uphall Camp. And its hard to imagine why anyone would have gone to the bother of laying those wooden trackways in Silvertown and Belmont, if not to serve some form of early community.
Sometimes the finds are spectacular. The south of Havering springs to mind. The area was long known for Bronze Age artefacts and putative earthworks. Then, in 2018, a trove of 453 objects known as the Havering Hoard was discovered at Rainham. The finds — a mix of weapons, tools and ingots — have been dated to 900 to 800 BC, and suggest some kind of settlement or centre existed nearby.
In truth, it’s likely that small, pre-Roman settlements were common throughout the London area, but most are lost forever thanks to centuries of heavy development. I’ve always had the tingling feeling that the best are yet to be discovered…
London’s newest place names
By way of footnote, we could perhaps look at the opposite scenario, London’s most recent place names. Hyperlocal coinages crop up all the time, of course. Every major development itches to impose its name on the London map. This is why we see constructions like ‘The Ram Quarter’ in Wandsworth, ‘Elephant Park’ for the old Heygate Estate in Southwark, and the now-defunct ‘Midtown’ to collectively describe Bloomsbury, St Giles and Holborn (imposed by a business interest group and widely despised). I’ve mapped these neologisms over in the other place.
Very occasionally, the names catch on. The Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, for example, sprang into existence in the wake of the 2012 Olympics. It will carry on in perpetuity because the area it covers — a former light-industrial hinterland — had no particularly resonant name beforehand. Likewise, a number of smaller estates within the park, such as East Wick, Sweetwater and Chobham Manor, are also likely to persist. Barking Riverside did not exist as a place name until a few years ago, nor did London City Island.
Other place names can rise from relative obscurity to become household names. In the late 1970s, Canary Wharf2 was an abandoned import quay in the former docks. It is now one of the world’s great economic centres. Heathrow was once a sleepy Hamlet on nobody’s radar; today it covers 3,000 acres and welcomes the equivalent of the entire population of the London Borough of Camden, or Portsmouth, every single day.
Some place names feel long-established but are not. New Cross is firmly ingrained in the London psyche. It appears twice on the Tube map, contains a world-famous arts college (Goldsmith’s) and straddles the old Roman road of Watling Street, mentioned up top. But the area has only been called New Cross for a few generations. Historically, this was the village of Hatcham. The name New Cross began to creep in from the early 19th century, when a toll gate was moved beside the Golden Cross public house. The name was cemented by the arrival of the railways, with both stations taking their names from the ‘New Cross’. Hatcham is now rarely used as a place name, but it lives on as a local parish and in a few other local institutions.
And then we have Fitzrovia. There are people alive today who predate this place name. Up until the 1940s, the area north-east of Oxford Street — built up since the 18th century — was usually regarded as a continuation of Soho or Marylebone. Its modern identity comes from the local pub, the Fitzroy Tavern, which became a popular drinking spot for artists and intellectuals before the Second World War. The Fitzrovia Neighbourhood Association suggests a coinage from 1940, when the term “first appeared in print” thanks to journalist Tom Driberg. However, I’ve since pushed that back a whole decade further, when a Miss Hamnett told the Socialist Review of a "district of London which is sometimes known as Fitzrovia" as early as 1930. That suggests the term was probably in use during the 1920s.
Even this is not the newest place name in central London. The area of Chinatown, to the south of Soho, now has its own strong identity. However, that only began to emerge from the 1970s when the hub of Chinese-owned businesses first began to grow. Previously, the eastern area of Limehouse, close to the docks, was considered to be London’s Chinatown.
Ancient or modern, London’s place names are an endless source of fascination. As we’ve seen, they come and go more often than might be imagined. I like to ponder what as-yet uncoined labels our grandchildren will find on their holo-maps. The Bimillennium Ecopark, perhaps, developed to celebrate London’s 2,000th anniversary in the 2040s? StarshipPadTwelve, a space launch complex at East Muskopolis (formerly Dagenham)? Perhaps the London Borough of Docklands, to unite the various watery quarters of east London. Or maybe the Greater Watling Lagoon if the worst-case scenarios of climate change come to pass. The future is a foreign country; they call things differently there.
Thanks for reading! As ever, please do leave a comment below, particularly if you’d like to (a) discuss further old place names, or (b) suggest other silly neologisms that London might see in the future. Do not ask (c) “What about London’s oldest buildings?”. I’m saving that topic for a future occasion.
You can also reach me on matt@londonist.com any time.
The suffix -chester or -caster usually implies an old Roman military camp or fort, providing a smidgen of nominative continuity.
Itself coined only in the 1930s, denoting the usual berth for ships from the Canary Islands.
Excellent. I read this on the train from Crystal Palace (new name) via Penge (ancient) and New Cross (new), to London Bridge (Roman). A couple of millenia in a 20-minute train ride!
There's the Dagenham Idol on show at Valence House. It's a carved wooden figure found in 1922 at when laying sewer pipes for Dagenham Ford and dated to be around 4000 years old i.e. Bronze Age. It really deserves to be far more celebrated as it's quite an eerie object, enigmatically other.