John Vane: On Chiswell Street, Sun Street and Silk Street

A discreet exit route from Liverpool Street station, reached via an upper level corridor, takes you to Sun Street Passage and then, after a fashion, to Sun Street itself, along which Bill Sikes frogmarched Oliver Twist en route to doing some housebreaking in Chertsey. Charles Dickens also had Sikes hustling the child across Finsbury Square and on to Chiswell Street and Barbican. Knowing this adds magic to every visit to those streets. Coincidence has lately led me down them three times.

The Dickens links are just one part of its long story. Sun Street has a junction with Wilson Street, where there’s a pub, The Flying Horse, whose sign hides an older, smaller one for the defunct Metropolitan Borough of Shoreditch. That local government unit was absorbed into a protective Hackney 61 years ago, but the south side of Sun Street – named after another pub, also with us no more – belongs to the City of London. And once you’ve you’ve passed Wilson Street, you’re in Islington.

Before reaching that point, walking west, you pass on the Hackney side the adjoining and connected Sun Street Hotel and Lima Peruvian restaurant. Their frontages are resplendently retro, unlike the evolving back of Broadgate across the road. The hotel displays a union jack and a flag of Malaysia, which denotes the origins of its owner, the MTD Group. The place was opened in 2022. It’s part of MTD’s swish mixed-use One Crown Place, which Hackney approved in 2015.

Soon, you’re on the south side of Finsbury Square, which doesn’t look its best just now. By contrast, the memorial to the 43 people killed in the Moorgate tube crash of 1975 is immaculate. Bernard Marks, the father of journalist and later TV comedy-drama writer Laurence Marks, was among those who perished. The cause of the crash remains a mystery.

On to Chiswell Street, whose signage preserves another pre-1965 relic – the Metropolitan Borough of Finsbury. Set back on your right, opening up like some temporal anomaly, are the generous grounds of the Honourable Artillery Company. Incorporated by Henry VIII, it is the British Army’s oldest regiment. What goes on there I don’t know, but through its iron gates you can see, on the far side, the company’s museum. There’s also a marquee. A sign on the gates provides a phone number to call if you’d like to go inside.

Further on, Chiswell Street is bisected by the Islington-City boundary. A left hand turn on latter’s side offers you Milton Street, which is a remnant of what was previously called Grub Street. It is thought to have been named after a refuse ditch that ran down it in the 13th Century and it later, famously, became the dwelling place of low-rent writers. “Grub Street” lives on as a synonym (one that most certainly does not apply here…).

Next up on Chiswell, The Brewery venue offers conference facilities. You’d never guess, would you, that beer used to be produced there? That ceased in 1976, the year after the Moorgate crash. Opposite, on the Islington side of the street, find another part of the ex-Whitbread complex has become a deluxe boutique hotel. The exterior brickwork provides a heritage and history clue.

Once past the brewery take the left at a four-way junction into Silk Street, which loops deeper into the Square Mile and leads to the main entrance of the Barbican Centre. The word “barbican” means fortified gateway, and London’s use of it stems from the area’s proximity to the Roman London Wall, completed in around the year 200. Oliver’s fictitious footsteps were yet to come.

Buy John Vane’s London novel Frightgeist here . 

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