The Name and the Gate
There are few places in England whose name tells their story as plainly as Highgate. The name is not a metaphor, not an allusion, not a corruption of some older, forgotten word. It means exactly what it says: a high gate — a gate at the top of a hill. For over five centuries, from the fourteenth century until the gate's removal in 1769, this gate stood at the summit of the hill that rises above the valley of the Fleet, controlling the passage of every traveller, every cart, every herd of cattle, and every coach that used the road between London and the north of England. The gate was Highgate's origin, its raison d'etre, and its identity, and even after the physical structure had been dismantled and carted away, its memory persisted in the name that it had given to the village — a name that has endured for nearly seven hundred years and that shows no sign of being forgotten.
The gate's position was determined by geography. It stood at the highest point of the road, at the summit of the long, steep climb from the valley to the south, where the road levelled out and the traveller could finally breathe freely after the punishing ascent. This was the natural point at which to erect a barrier, because every traveller had to pass this way — there was no alternative route over the hill — and because the summit, with its clear sightlines in all directions, offered the gatekeeper an unobstructed view of approaching traffic. The gate was both a practical device — a means of collecting tolls — and a symbolic marker, announcing to every traveller that they were entering the village of Highgate and that they were now subject to the authority of the bishop whose road they were using.
The exact form of the medieval gate is not known with certainty. It was probably a simple structure — a wooden bar or chain stretched across the road, supported by posts, with a small gatehouse or booth beside it where the gatekeeper sat and collected the tolls. Later depictions, from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, show a more substantial structure with a proper gatehouse, but these images may reflect improvements and modifications made in the intervening centuries rather than the original medieval gate. What is certain is that the gate was a conspicuous feature of the hilltop landscape, visible from some distance to travellers approaching from both directions, and that it served as the focal point of the settlement that grew up around it.
The Hermit Keeper
In the earliest period of the gate's existence, the toll was collected by a hermit — a figure whose presence at Highgate embodies the peculiar blend of the sacred and the secular that characterised so much of medieval English life. The hermit was not a monk or a friar but a solitary religious figure, living outside the formal structures of the Church, who had chosen to devote his life to prayer and to the service of travellers on the road. His role at Highgate was twofold: he collected the tolls that paid for the maintenance of the road and the chapel, and he prayed for the souls of those who passed through the gate, offering spiritual comfort to travellers who were embarking on a journey that, in the medieval period, was genuinely dangerous.
The hermit's dwelling — the hermitage — stood beside the gate, a small, simple building that served as both his home and his place of prayer. The hermitage is first mentioned in documentary sources in the early fifteenth century, but it was probably established at the same time as the gate itself, in the mid-fourteenth century. The hermit lived a life of considerable austerity by modern standards, subsisting on a modest stipend from the Bishop of London and on the charity of passing travellers, and spending his days in a rhythm of prayer, toll-collection, and road maintenance that varied little from one season to the next. His isolation was not complete — the gate was a busy place, and the hermit would have had daily contact with the travellers who used the road — but his life was essentially solitary, a life of devotion and service conducted in the shadow of the gate that defined his world.
The tradition of the hermit keeper persisted at Highgate for several generations, though the later hermits were probably more secular in character than their predecessors. By the fifteenth century, the toll revenues had grown to a point where they could support a more comfortable existence than the austere devotional life of the early hermits, and the keepers of the gate became increasingly indistinguishable from the lay officials who collected tolls at other points on the road. The chapel beside the gate continued to function as a place of worship, but the hermitage itself gradually lost its religious character and became simply the gatekeeper's house — a practical dwelling rather than a place of spiritual retreat. The Reformation, which swept away so many of the minor religious foundations of medieval England, probably delivered the final blow to the hermit tradition at Highgate, though the exact date of its cessation is not recorded.
The Tolls
The tolls collected at Highgate were the financial lifeblood of the village in its early centuries. Every traveller who passed through the gate was obliged to pay, and the rates were set by the bishop's officials according to a schedule that differentiated between different types of traffic. A man on foot paid the least; a horseman paid more; a cart or wagon paid more still; and a coach, with its multiple horses and its wealthy occupants, paid the highest toll of all. Cattle and sheep, which were driven through the gate in large numbers on their way to the London markets, were charged per head, and the drovers who accompanied them were among the most regular and most reluctant payers of the Highgate toll.
The income from the tolls was substantial, reflecting the enormous volume of traffic that used the road through Highgate. In the medieval period, the toll revenue was divided between the bishop, who received the greater share, and the gatekeeper, who retained a portion as his fee. The bishop's share was supposed to be used for the maintenance of the road and the chapel, though it is not entirely clear how conscientiously this obligation was fulfilled. The condition of the road was a perennial source of complaint among travellers, who grumbled that the tolls they paid were not reflected in the quality of the surface they were paying to use. This complaint — that toll roads were badly maintained despite the money collected from their users — was a common grievance throughout medieval and early modern England, and it eventually led to the establishment of the turnpike trusts in the late seventeenth century.
The toll schedule was periodically revised to reflect changes in the volume and character of traffic. As the coaching trade grew in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, new categories were added to the schedule, and the rates were adjusted to extract the maximum revenue from the increasing flow of vehicles. The coaches themselves were a particularly lucrative source of toll income, because they were large, heavy, and numerous, and because their passengers — who were generally among the wealthier classes of society — could afford to pay. The toll on a fully laden stagecoach passing through Highgate in the eighteenth century might amount to several shillings — a significant sum that was reflected in the fares charged to passengers by the coaching companies.
The Gate's Position and Physical Form
The precise position of the medieval gate has been the subject of considerable local debate, though the general consensus places it at or near the junction of the present-day Highgate High Street with the roads leading to Hampstead Lane and Archway Road. This location — at the very top of the hill, where the road from the south levels out and the village begins — is consistent with the earliest descriptions of the gate and with the logic of toll collection, which required a position from which there was no possibility of bypassing the barrier. The junction at the top of the hill was such a position: every traveller approaching from the south had to pass this point, and the steep, wooded slopes on either side of the road made it impossible to circumvent the gate by going around it.
The gate's physical form evolved over the centuries, from the simple wooden bar of the medieval period to the more substantial structure of the turnpike era. By the seventeenth century, the gate consisted of a substantial wooden barrier — a gate in the literal sense, mounted on posts and hinged to swing open when the toll had been paid — with a gatehouse beside it where the keeper lived and where the toll was collected. The gatehouse was a small but well-built structure, with a room for the keeper and his family on the upper floor and a booth or window on the ground floor through which the toll was transacted. The gate and the gatehouse together formed a conspicuous landmark at the entrance to the village, and their presence reminded every traveller that they were entering a place with its own authority and its own rules.
The area around the gate was the busiest part of the village, a place of constant activity where the traffic of the road met the commercial life of the settlement. The inns and alehouses that clustered around the gate did a brisk trade with travellers who stopped to pay the toll and took the opportunity to refresh themselves before continuing their journey. The smithies and saddlers who served the road users were located nearby, and the market that was held periodically in the open space beside the gate attracted traders and buyers from across the surrounding area. The gate was not merely a barrier but a gathering point, a focal centre around which the social and economic life of the village revolved, and its removal in 1769 left a void in the village's physical and symbolic landscape that was never entirely filled.
The Turnpike Era
The establishment of the turnpike trusts in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries brought a new level of organisation and professionalism to the collection of tolls at Highgate. The Highgate and Hampstead Turnpike Trust, established by Act of Parliament in 1712, assumed responsibility for the maintenance of the road through Highgate and for the collection of the tolls that funded it. The trust was governed by a board of trustees — local gentlemen and property owners who served without pay but who had a direct interest in the quality of the road — and it employed a staff of toll collectors, surveyors, and labourers who maintained the road to a standard that was, by the standards of the time, relatively high.
Under the turnpike system, the tolls at Highgate were rationalised and regularised. The trust published a schedule of tolls that was displayed at the gate, listing the charges for every category of traffic — from a single horseman at a penny or twopence to a coach and six at several shillings. The schedule was updated periodically by Act of Parliament, and the trustees had the power to adjust individual rates in response to changes in traffic volume or road conditions. The toll collectors were salaried employees, answerable to the trustees, and the income from the tolls was accounted for with a degree of transparency that had been notably absent from the earlier, episcopal system.
The turnpike era brought significant improvements to the road through Highgate. The trust invested in the widening and grading of the road surface, the construction of proper drainage channels, and the repair of the stretches that had been most damaged by the heavy traffic. The hill itself was regraded on several occasions, with the steepest sections cut down and the surface relaid to create a more manageable gradient for the coaches and wagons that toiled up it daily. These improvements were funded by the toll revenue, and they were a direct benefit to the travellers who paid the tolls — though, as always, there were complaints that the money was not being spent wisely and that the road remained in worse condition than it should have been.
Removal of the Gate in 1769
The gate that had given Highgate its name was removed in 1769, a casualty of the road improvements that the turnpike trust was undertaking as part of a broader programme of modernisation. The immediate cause of the gate's removal was the construction of a new, improved road up the hill — a wider, better-graded road that followed a slightly different line from the medieval route and that rendered the old gate at the summit redundant. The tolls continued to be collected, but at a new tollbar further down the hill, at the foot of the ascent, where the turnpike trust's surveyors had determined that the barrier would be more effective and less obstructive to the flow of traffic.
The removal of the gate was not, by all accounts, an event of great ceremony or public attention. The structure was dismantled, the gatehouse was demolished or converted to other uses, and the site was absorbed into the streetscape of the village. Yet the significance of the event was considerable. For over four centuries, the gate had been the defining feature of Highgate — the physical manifestation of the village's identity and the source of the name by which it was known. Its removal was a kind of erasure, a deletion of the landmark that had given the village its reason for being, and it left Highgate with the curious distinction of being named after something that no longer existed. The name persisted, of course — it was too deeply embedded in the language and the geography of the area to be changed — but the gate itself was gone, and with it the last physical connection to the fourteenth-century origins of the settlement.
The toll collection continued at Highgate, albeit at a different location, for more than a century after the gate's removal. The turnpike trusts maintained their tollbars on the approaches to the village until the 1870s, when the entire turnpike system was abolished by Act of Parliament and the responsibility for road maintenance was transferred to the local authorities. The last toll was collected at Highgate in 1876, bringing to an end a practice that had begun with the hermit and his wooden bar more than five hundred years earlier. The long era of toll collection at Highgate was over, and the road through the village became, for the first time in its history, a free public highway.
Legacy in the Village Name and Layout
The toll gate of Highgate has been gone for over two hundred and fifty years, but its legacy is everywhere in the village. The name itself is the most obvious inheritance — a permanent reminder of the structure that created the settlement and that shaped its development for centuries. But the gate's influence extends far beyond the name. The village's physical layout, with its focal point at the junction where the gate once stood and its streets radiating outward from that point, is a direct product of the gate's presence, and the pattern of development that it established in the medieval period continues to define the village's form today.
The Gatehouse pub, which stands at the corner of Highgate High Street near the site of the old gate, preserves the memory of the toll gate in its name and in its position at the heart of the village. The pub has been a focal point of Highgate's social life for centuries, and its association with the gate — which it originally served as a kind of adjunct, providing refreshment to travellers who had stopped to pay the toll — gives it a historical depth that few other pubs in London can match. The building has been rebuilt and renovated many times since the gate was removed, but its position at the crossroads of the village, at the point where the roads from the south, the west, and the north converge, is a direct legacy of the gate's original location.
More broadly, the toll gate shaped the economic and social character of the village in ways that persist to this day. Highgate's tradition as a place of hospitality — its abundance of pubs, restaurants, and cafes, its culture of welcoming visitors and entertaining strangers — can be traced directly back to the centuries during which the toll gate brought a steady stream of travellers to the village's doors. The village's sense of itself as a distinct community, separate from the surrounding city and possessed of its own identity and traditions, also owes something to the gate, which served for centuries as a physical boundary between Highgate and the world beyond. The gate is gone, but the sense of place that it created — the feeling that Highgate is a village with its own character, its own history, and its own way of doing things — is as strong today as it has ever been. The toll gate of Highgate was a simple structure, a bar across a road at the top of a hill, but the settlement that grew up around it has proved to be one of the most enduring and distinctive communities in London.
*Published in the Hampstead Renovations Heritage Collection — exploring the architecture, history, and stories of London's most remarkable neighbourhoods.*