Noble Street
Here, next to the church of St Anne and St Agnes, at the corner of Noble Street, is the south-west corner of the Cripplegate Fort. The section of wall here is the earliest built. The fort dates from about 120AD and contained accommodation for about 1000 of the 4000 Roman soldiers in Britain at the time.
This corner of the fort has a square guard tower and a clearly visible drainage gulley. It is easy to see here how the additional material was added outside the fort wall to strengthen it when the remainder of the landside wall was built in 200AD.
At this time the inner wall was removed, leaving the fort open towards the City itself, and the city wall went off eastwards from here to the new Aldersgate, which replaced the Western Gate of the fort itself.
From much later times we see the plaster on the wall, which would have been the inside of rooms in houses built against the wall in medieval and even Victorian times. The holes we can see set into the wall at various heights show where joists would have supported the different floors of the houses.
The wall is now a haven for wild flora including Oxford ragwort, creeping buttercup, rocket, bittercress and buddleia and brambles.
It is important to remember that this wall was a vital protection for the city, and largely defined the shape of the City of London from 200AD until the 1700s, when the city began to expand outwards. The whole wall enclosed some 330 acres of land and stood around 18 feet high.
