Ludgate Circus is a road junction in the City of London where Farringdon Street/New Bridge Street (the A201) crosses Fleet Street/Ludgate Hill. (Ludgate Hill is a gentle rise to St Paul's Cathedral.)
Fleet Street was the only direct road between the cities of London and Westminster till the Embankment was opened in 1870. The Circus crosses the River Fleet, London's largest subterranean river. The concave-arced façades of the buildings facing the Circus were constructed between 1864 and 1875 using Haytor granite from Dartmoor in Devon transported via the prototype Haytor Granite Tramway.
In Charles Dickens' Dictionary of London (1879) the area was described as "Farringdon-circus".
Etymology
The name
Ludgate, according to Stow in his 1598 Survey of London, was derived from the belief that the gate had been created by the pre-Roman British king of London,
King Lud, as many of his contemporaries believed. When a new gate was erected a statue on it depicted him, along with one of Queen Elizabeth I.
['The Farringdon Wards of the City of London a ... history' pp. 7–15, by Tony Sharp, London 2002]
Stations
Had the
Fleet line of the London Underground been built, it would have had a station at . However, the Fleet line's proposed route evolved into what is now the
Jubilee line, which went south of the
River Thames before reaching Ludgate Circus. In 1990 however, St. Paul's Thameslink (later renamed City Thameslink) was opened on the proposed site, abolishing Ludgate Hill and Holborn Viaduct stations. In an episode of
Rumpole of the Bailey there is a wide shot of St Bride's Church and Ludgate Circus that was filmed before City Thameslink station was built.
[Season 5, episode 6 Rumpole and the Quality of Life: starting at 19m 37s]
Public telephone
The
Post Office's first coin-operated public call box was installed in 1906 at its Ludgate Circus branch, by the British subsidiary of
Western Electric (incorporated in Britain in 1910).
[ Events in telecommunications history: 1906. BT. Retrieved 19 October 2017.][ "Western-Electric Co." Grace's Guide to British Industrial History. Retrieved 19 October 2017.]
See also
-
Ludgate Circus tube station
