London lost most of its alleys in the 20th century. But now they're making a return.
Take a look at any map of old London and you can't help but notice the alleys. Here, for example, is Holborn in 1745.
And below is the same stretch of road today, as represented on OpenStreetMap:
While a few of the old alleys survive on the southern side, there is now only one to the north — the semi-private passage that leads to Waterhouse Square within the Holborn Bars building, on the site of Furnival's Inn.
It's the same story all over central London. Ancient street patterns have been gradually eroded by the erection of ever larger buildings. Offices now occupy entire blocks, where before sat a jumbled congeries of tenements, shops and crooked back alleys.
This is not a recent phenomenon. The Georgians cleared away numerous courts and alleys to build the Bank of England and Mansion House, for example. The Victorians and Edwardians followed on with dozens of chunky commercial and civic buildings — Portland stone boxes that would erase whole neighbourhoods.
The phenomenon gathered pace after the Second World War. The skyscrapers and groundscrapers of the mid-to-late 20th century utterly reshaped London's streetscape. Alleys and courts still survive in pockets, such as north of Fleet Street or between Cornhill and Lombard Street, but they are greatly diminished in number.
But a comeback is under way.
Return of the alley
For decades, London's new office blocks have been monolithic, isolationist affairs, often taking up a whole block. No public access. You're not welcome here. In recent years, however, developers have been encouraged to increase the 'public realm' around — and even through — their buildings.
Examples are easy to find in the Square Mile. The large 100 Bishopsgate development on the corner of Camomile Street opened in 2020 during the brief interlude between Covid shutdowns. Its southern flank features a new cut-through known as Clerks Place, which leads all the way through to St Mary Axe. It's pleasant enough, with fresh views of St Ethelburga's church and a sculpture courtyard, and offers a new way to navigate the City, away from the traffic.
Actually, Clerks Place is a rebirth of sorts. An alley of similar name ran a little to the north of here until the 20th century. The new version not only renews a lost thoroughfare, but extends it farther east.
Nearby, the City's tallest building, 22 Bishopsgate, perches over another new-build alley through to Undershaft, where you can then take a cutting straight through the middle of the Leadenhall Building (Cheesegrater). Such manoeuvres were impossible a decade ago, when office blocks from the 60s and 70s blocked the routes. Other recent examples can be found near Aldgate, near St Bartholomew's, along Fetter Lane and through the huge Bloomberg building, which reinstated a long-lost part of Watling Street as a new cut-through.
Further re-alleying occurred in 2023, when a section of Thames path near Cannon Street was reopened for public use after two decades of absence.
The City of London Corporation has a map showing all the new pedestrian routes installed between 2016 and 2025. These include many walkways that have simply been upgraded (some of those at the Barbican, for example), but the graphic is nevertheless quite startling:
Meanwhile, across the water in Southwark, the Borough Yards development has reintroduced a series of brick-lined alleyways beneath the viaducts, including the return of Dirty Lane. Shop-lined and lit by LED, it's a different world from its 19th century counterpart (I suspect... can't claim to remember it). Still, it's good to see the route and the name restored.
Big plans for the Square Mile
The City of London is betting big on back passages. Working with developers, it plans to greatly increase the number of new routes between buildings.
"The Square Mile will become a pedestrian priority City, in a way that surprises and delights," trumpeted a press release in mid-February 2025. The nucleus of this new network will be a series of courts and passages between three new and adjacent developments: 55 Old Broad Street, 99 Bishopsgate and 55 Bishopsgate, all of which have planning permission.
But the City wants to go much further and make alleyways an intrinsic part of its future — partly to absorb the greater leisure footfall it anticipates over coming years:
"...Wherever appropriate, Planning Officers will seek to create shortcuts and cut throughs between busy throughfares [sic] to ease congestion, make better connections to Underground and mainline stations, re-introduce lost historical alleys to public use, open up new views of City landmarks to improve wayfinding, as well provide [sic] a better pedestrian experience along the Thames and up to the public high-walk network. A radical transformation re-inventing the City's alleys."
I particularly like the "re-introduce lost historical alleys" bit. The more the merrier.
Of course, few if any of these new or restored alleyways will exude the charm and romance of their crooked medieval counterparts — they'll likely be glass-walled canyons with neatly clipped planters and occasional abstract sculptures. Then again, they won't exude the grime, squelch and uric odours of historic alleyways.
This isn't the first attempt at a pedestrian City
One thing to note about the Broad Street/Bishopsgate scheme shown above: it will see the removal of the disused footbridge that currently straddles Wormwood Street. This fellow:
The bridge represents part of the City's former attempt to make itself a pedestrian-friendly place. The Pedway scheme of the 60s and 70s mandated that all new developments should build-in provision for walkways raised above street level. The idea was to gradually link these together to form a walker's paradise above the traffic.
The idea worked at the Barbican, but failed to gain traction across the wider City. Here and there, though, small fragments of the stillborn network survive. My favourite links Pudding Lane to the Thames.
Recent years have seen renewed interest in these moribund walkways. New ones were even installed around London Wall — indicated by the dense cluster of red to the north of the map above. With this latest announcement from the City, it sounds as though more conventional pedestrian routes will be the future, rather than bridges in the sky. That said, I hope that the idea isn't abandoned entirely, and might even be expanded where developments allow. Raised walkways offer unique and surprising views of the City, although admittedly they come with accessibility complications that surface-level alleys don't have.
All in all, we can only welcome the news that London's stock of alleys will continue to grow. Not all the ancient ways should be brought back, however. Dirty Lane in Borough once had two neighbours called Naked Boy Alley and Whore's Nest. I think we're better off without those.
