The printing and watchmaking trades left brick workshop buildings on the streets north west of the City.
What Clerkenwell looks like
is the middle of the old village and there has been no grass on it for more than three hundred years. It is a paved triangle with pubs and offices around it, and the former Middlesex Sessions House of 1782 stands at the top. The is at number 37a, where Lenin edited Iskra in 1902 and 1903.
The village grew up outside the London Wall and outside the City's control. The Knights Hospitaller had their English headquarters here. , built in 1504 by Prior Thomas Docwra, still stands between St John's Lane and St John's Square.
Clock and watch making concentrated around Northampton Square, and printing and brewing followed. They left brick workshop buildings with wide iron framed windows. Those buildings stand next to plainer brick terraces like the one at 5 to 10 .
The ground falls west to , which is built over the buried River Fleet. The railway runs beside it in open cutting. Farringdon station opened in 1863 as the terminus of the Metropolitan Railway, the first underground passenger railway anywhere. is north of that, up the hill. Goswell Road is the eastern edge, with the Barbican towers at the end of it.
On the old Hugh Myddelton School of 1893 stands on the site of the Clerkenwell House of Detention. The prison basements are still under it.
Films shot in Clerkenwell
Terry Gilliam put the travelling show from The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus on Clerkenwell Close, opposite the Horseshoe pub and just north of the Green.
A Fish Called Wanda, 1988
The getaway from the Hatton Garden robbery comes through here. Wanda waits with the car on the Green in a moustache. Mrs Coady spots her while she is out walking her dogs. The robbers change cars on the steps between Roberts Place and Clerkenwell Close, and Ken throws the evidence away at .
About a Boy, 2002
Will lives on St James's Walk. The front door is not a real one. A false entrance was built onto the side of 16 to 18 St James's Walk at the corner of Sekforde Street, because the building was offices and the crew wanted better camera angles. The inside of the flat was built at Shepperton. The church where he does not volunteer is St James on Clerkenwell Close.
What Clerkenwell can double for
Clerkenwell can stand in for a workshop and warehouse district and a village centre inside a city.
