The Great North Road

Before the Road

Long before Highgate existed as a settlement, the ridge of high ground on which it stands was already a significant feature of the landscape north of London. Rising to over four hundred feet above sea level, the hill formed part of the Northern Heights — the chain of clay-capped hills that stretches from Hampstead Heath in the west through Highgate, Muswell Hill, and Alexandra Palace to the east. In the prehistoric and Roman periods, the main route from London to the north ran not through Highgate but through the valley to the east, following a line that roughly corresponds to the modern Holloway Road and Hornsey Road, avoiding the steep climb over the hilltop. The Romans, who were practical road-builders above all else, had no particular reason to route their road over a four-hundred-foot hill when a perfectly serviceable valley route was available alongside it.

The Roman road from London to the north — the road that would eventually become Ermine Street — ran from Bishopsgate through Shoreditch, up through what is now Stoke Newington, and thence northward through Tottenham and Edmonton. It passed well to the east of Highgate, leaving the hilltop in its primeval state: a dense woodland of oak, elm, and hornbeam that formed part of the great forest of Middlesex. This forest, which in the early medieval period covered most of the land between London and the northern counties, was the domain of the Bishop of London, who held the manor of Hornsey and its surrounding parkland as part of his episcopal estate. The hilltop was part of this domain — a wild, wooded place where deer ran among the ancient trees and where the only human visitors were the bishop's huntsmen and their retainers.

The transformation of Highgate from a wooded hilltop into one of the most important road junctions in England began in the fourteenth century, when the Bishop of London authorised the construction of a new road through his estate. The existing route through the valley had become increasingly difficult to use, particularly in winter, when the heavy clay soil turned the road into a quagmire that could swallow a horse and rider up to the axles. The new road, which climbed the hill through a cutting in the woodland, offered a firmer surface and a drier passage, and it quickly became the preferred route for travellers heading north from London. The gate at the top of the hill — the "high gate" from which the village takes its name — was erected to collect the tolls that were charged for the use of the new road, and the settlement of Highgate began to take shape around it.

The Medieval Route

By the fifteenth century, the road through Highgate had established itself as the principal route from London to the north of England. The journey from the city began at Smithfield, just outside the walls, and proceeded north through Islington — then a small village surrounded by fields — before climbing the long, steep ascent of Highgate Hill. The climb was gruelling: the road rose some three hundred feet in less than a mile, through a cutting in the dense woodland that still covered much of the hillside, before emerging at the summit beside the toll gate and the chapel that had been built to serve travellers on the road. From Highgate, the road descended the northern slope of the hill towards Finchley, crossing the open common before continuing northward through Barnet, Hatfield, and on to the great cities of the Midlands and the north.

The steepness of Highgate Hill made it one of the most notorious stretches of road in the London area. Carts and coaches frequently overturned on the ascent, horses stumbled and fell on the slippery surface, and in winter the road could become virtually impassable. The hill was also a favourite haunt of highwaymen, who used the dense woodland on either side of the road to ambush travellers as they struggled up the slope. The combination of physical difficulty and criminal danger gave Highgate Hill a fearsome reputation among travellers, and the sight of the toll gate at the top of the climb — signalling that the worst was over — was a source of genuine relief to those who had survived the ascent.

The village that grew up around the toll gate owed its existence entirely to the road. Highgate's first buildings — the chapel, the hermitage that housed the toll-keeper, and a handful of cottages and alehouses — were all built to serve the needs of travellers, and as the traffic on the road increased through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the village grew with it. Inns were established to provide food, drink, and overnight accommodation; stables were built to tend and replace the horses that had been exhausted by the climb; and smithies, saddlers, and other tradesmen set up shop to serve the coaching trade. Highgate became, in effect, a service station on the Great North Road, a place where the journey north from London paused for refreshment before continuing on its way.

Highgate as a Staging Post

The coaching era, which reached its zenith in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, transformed Highgate from a modest roadside village into one of the busiest and most prosperous staging posts in the south of England. A staging post was a place where the horses were changed — where the tired, sweating animals that had hauled the coach up from London were replaced by fresh teams for the next stage of the journey — and the frequency with which this operation was performed gave an accurate measure of the post's importance. At Highgate, the changeover happened dozens of times a day during the peak coaching years, and the village's inns and stables hummed with the constant activity of ostlers, coachmen, and travellers.

The staging post system required a substantial infrastructure. Each inn maintained its own stables, where teams of horses were kept in readiness for the next coach. The ostlers — the men who tended the horses and performed the changeovers — were skilled workers whose speed and efficiency could make the difference between a coach arriving on time and a delayed journey. A good ostler could change a team of four horses in under two minutes, unhitching the tired animals, leading them away to the stables, and bringing out the fresh team with a practised economy of movement that impressed even the most experienced travellers. The inns also employed postboys, who rode the lead horses on the next stage of the journey, and coachmen, who drove the vehicles themselves — a small army of workers whose livelihoods depended entirely on the traffic that passed through Highgate on its way north.

The economic impact of the coaching trade on the village was enormous. The inns were the largest employers in Highgate, and the money that passed through their hands — from the fares paid by passengers, the fees charged for horse changes, and the food and drink consumed by travellers — sustained a substantial local economy. Butchers, bakers, brewers, and grocers all depended on the coaching trade for a significant proportion of their income, and the village's tradesmen and shopkeepers benefited from the steady flow of customers that the road brought to their doors. Highgate was, in the fullest sense, a road town — a place whose prosperity was directly linked to the volume of traffic that passed through it, and whose fortunes rose and fell with the state of the roads and the health of the coaching industry.

The Coaching Era's Golden Age

The golden age of coaching on the Great North Road lasted from roughly 1780 to 1840, a period of sixty years during which the road through Highgate carried more traffic, more passengers, and more commerce than at any time in its history. The improvements in road engineering pioneered by Thomas Telford and John McAdam had transformed the highways of England from muddy, rutted tracks into smooth, well-drained surfaces capable of supporting fast, heavy vehicles, and the coaching companies had responded by increasing the speed and frequency of their services. The Royal Mail coaches, which carried the post between London and the northern cities, were the aristocrats of the road — elegant, fast, and punctual, they swept through Highgate at speeds of up to twelve miles an hour, their red and black livery and their distinctive horn-blast announcing their approach from half a mile away.

The ordinary stage coaches were slower but more numerous. Dozens of services ran daily from London to destinations across the north of England and Scotland, and virtually all of them passed through Highgate on the first stage of their journey. The names of the coaches — the Edinburgh Mail, the York Highflyer, the Leeds Union, the Newcastle Defiance — evoked the romance and the drama of long-distance travel in an age before railways, and the sight of a fully laden coach cresting Highgate Hill, its four horses steaming with exertion, its passengers clinging to their seats, was one of the great spectacles of English road transport. For the people of Highgate, it was an everyday occurrence, as unremarkable as the passing of a bus would be to a modern London resident, but for visitors and travellers, it was a sight that lingered in the memory.

The coaching era also brought a degree of social distinction to Highgate that the village had not previously enjoyed. The proximity to London, the quality of the inns, and the beauty of the hilltop setting attracted wealthy residents who valued the combination of rural tranquillity and easy access to the capital. Grand houses were built along the High Street and on the slopes of the hill, and Highgate acquired the character of a prosperous, genteel village that it has retained to this day. The road that had created the village continued to shape its development, drawing in new residents, new businesses, and new money that transformed the rough-and-ready coaching stop of earlier centuries into one of the most desirable addresses in north London.

The Toll Gate and the Turnpike Trusts

The toll gate at the top of Highgate Hill was the mechanism by which the road was funded for most of its history. From the fourteenth century onwards, every traveller who passed through Highgate was obliged to pay a toll, the proceeds of which were used to maintain the road and to support the chapel and the hermitage at the summit. The tolls were originally collected by a hermit — a religious figure who combined the role of gatekeeper with that of spiritual guardian — but as the traffic on the road increased and the sums involved grew larger, the collection of tolls became a secular operation managed by appointed officials and, later, by the turnpike trusts.

The turnpike system, which was established in England in the late seventeenth century, placed the maintenance of the nation's main roads in the hands of private trusts, which were empowered to collect tolls from road users and to use the proceeds for the upkeep of their particular stretch of highway. The Highgate and Hampstead Turnpike Trust, established by Act of Parliament in 1712, was responsible for the road through Highgate, and under its management the road was improved, widened, and maintained to a standard that the medieval and early modern periods had never achieved. The trust erected a substantial toll gate at the summit of the hill — a bar or chain across the road, attended by a gatekeeper who collected the tolls from passing travellers — and the gate became one of the most familiar landmarks of north London.

The tolls charged at Highgate varied according to the type of vehicle, the number of horses, and the nature of the goods being carried. A single horseman might pay a penny; a coach and four would pay several shillings; and a heavy wagon loaded with goods would pay more still. The income generated by these tolls was considerable, reflecting the enormous volume of traffic that passed through Highgate on its way north, and the trust used the money to maintain the road in a state of repair that compared favourably with most of the highways in the south of England. The gate itself was removed in 1769, when the road was realigned and improved, but the tolls continued to be collected at a bar further down the hill until the turnpike system was finally abolished in the 1870s.

The Coming of the Railways

The event that transformed Highgate's relationship with the Great North Road more than any other was the opening of the railway. The Great Northern Railway, which began operations in 1850, offered a service from London's King's Cross station to Peterborough, Doncaster, York, and beyond that was faster, cheaper, and more comfortable than anything the coaching companies could match. Within a decade, the stage coaches that had been the lifeblood of Highgate's economy for centuries had virtually disappeared from the road, replaced by the iron horse and the steel rail. The effect on the village was immediate and dramatic. The coaching inns lost their business overnight; the stables stood empty; the ostlers, postboys, and coachmen found themselves without employment; and the local economy, which had been built on the coaching trade for generations, was forced to reinvent itself.

The railway did not bypass Highgate entirely. A branch line, originally built by the Great Northern Railway and later extended, served Highgate station (now a stop on the Northern line of the Underground), and the railway brought a new kind of traffic to the village: commuters. The wealthy merchants and professionals who had previously valued Highgate for its combination of rural charm and proximity to the coaching road now valued it for its railway connection to the City and the West End, and the village's transformation from a road town into a residential suburb — a process that had begun in the coaching era — was completed by the coming of the train. The great houses that had once looked out over a road thronged with coaches and wagons now looked out over a quieter, more domesticated landscape, and the character of Highgate shifted from commercial bustle to residential calm.

The road itself did not disappear, of course. It was reclassified, first as a turnpike road and then, after the abolition of the turnpike trusts, as a public highway maintained by the local authority. In the twentieth century, it was designated as part of the A1, the modern successor to the Great North Road, and it continues to carry a substantial volume of traffic through the village. But the character of that traffic has changed beyond recognition. The horses, the coaches, and the staging-post bustle have given way to cars, buses, and lorries, and the road that once brought life and prosperity to the village is now more often experienced as a nuisance — a source of noise, pollution, and congestion that the residents of Highgate would gladly do without.

The Modern A1 and the Road's Legacy

Today, the road through Highgate is a curious palimpsest, a surface on which the traces of a thousand years of travel are still faintly visible beneath the asphalt and the traffic lights. The route that medieval travellers followed up Highgate Hill is the same route that modern motorists drive, and the steep gradient that exhausted the horses of the coaching era still slows the buses and lorries that grind their way up from Archway. The toll gate is gone, the coaching inns have been converted into flats and restaurants, and the ostlers' stables have been replaced by garages and car parks, but the essential geography of the place — the hill, the summit, the descent to the north — remains unchanged, a reminder that the road, for all its transformations, is still fundamentally the same road that was cut through the Bishop of London's forest seven centuries ago.

The Great North Road's legacy in Highgate extends far beyond the physical road itself. The village's street plan, its building pattern, and its social character are all products of the road's influence, shaped by centuries of coaching traffic and the economic activity it generated. The High Street, with its mix of shops, pubs, and Georgian houses, owes its form to the needs of the road users who once passed through in their thousands; the inns that still line the village centre — The Flask, The Gatehouse, The Angel — are direct descendants of the coaching establishments that served the Great North Road; and the village's sense of itself as a place apart, a hilltop settlement with its own identity and its own traditions, is rooted in the centuries during which it served as a gateway between London and the north.

The road also shaped Highgate's relationship with the wider world in ways that continue to resonate. For centuries, the village was a place where people came and went — travellers passing through on their way to York or Edinburgh, drovers herding their cattle to the London markets, merchants carrying goods between the capital and the provinces. This constant flow of strangers gave Highgate a cosmopolitan quality that set it apart from the more insular villages of the surrounding countryside, and it fostered a tradition of hospitality and openness that survives in the village's numerous pubs, restaurants, and cultural institutions. The Great North Road made Highgate what it is, and the road's influence, though invisible to the casual observer, is woven into every aspect of the village's character and identity.

*Published in the Hampstead Renovations Heritage Collection — exploring the architecture, history, and stories of London's most remarkable neighbourhoods.*