Tucked away just off Eastcheap in the City of London, Rood Lane is easy to miss. Today it is a short street lined with modern commercial buildings, connecting Eastcheap with Fenchurch Street. Yet its unassuming appearance conceals a history stretching back through medieval London, the Reformation and the rebuilding of the City after the Great Fire.
The history of Rood Lane is closely connected with Eastcheap, one of London's oldest market districts. Eastcheap was recorded by around 1100 and was historically an important market for meat and fish. Its name derives from the Old English word chepe, meaning market, distinguishing it from the larger market area around Cheapside. The narrow lanes running away from Eastcheap towards the Thames and the northern parts of the City formed part of a dense commercial neighbourhood in which particular trades often became associated with particular streets.
Rood Lane itself was originally known as St Margaret Pattens Lane, after the church of St Margaret Pattens, which still stands at the corner of Rood Lane and Eastcheap. Medieval records preserve several variations of this earlier name, including “Lane of St Margaret atte Patynes”, dating from the late thirteenth century.
The meaning of “Pattens” is traditionally associated with the footwear trade. Pattens were wooden or metal overshoes worn beneath ordinary shoes, raising the wearer above the mud, refuse and water that covered London's streets. John Stow recorded that pattens were once “usually made and sold” in the lane. The area therefore provides a vivid example of the way medieval London's streets often reflected the trades and crafts of the people who lived and worked there.
The street's later name, however, has a more dramatic origin. A rood was a cross or crucifix, and according to Stow a rood was placed in the churchyard of St Margaret Pattens while the old church was being demolished and rebuilt. Offerings made to the crucifix were used to help finance the rebuilding work. In May 1538, during the religious upheavals of the English Reformation, the rood and the structure containing it were found broken into pieces by unknown persons. The incident became sufficiently memorable for the lane to acquire the name Rood Lane.
The sixteenth century was therefore a turning point not only for the street's name but also for its religious landscape. The destruction of religious images was becoming increasingly common as England moved away from the practices of the medieval Catholic Church. In this context, the broken rood at St Margaret Pattens can be seen as a small but striking local episode in a much larger national transformation.
Rood Lane and its church were again affected by one of the greatest disasters in London's history: the Great Fire of 1666. St Margaret Pattens was destroyed, along with much of the surrounding City. The church was subsequently rebuilt to the designs of Sir Christopher Wren and was completed in the 1680s. Its distinctive spire remains one of the most recognisable features of the Eastcheap area and provides an architectural reminder of the City's reconstruction after the Fire.
Over subsequent centuries, the neighbourhood continued to be shaped by commerce. The nearby waterfront, Billingsgate Market and the trading streets around Eastcheap ensured that the area remained busy with merchants, warehouses, porters and businesses connected with London's expanding commercial world. Even as the City changed, the narrow medieval street pattern largely survived.
Today, Rood Lane is no longer associated with patten-makers or religious pilgrimage. Its historic importance is easy to overlook amid the offices and traffic of the modern financial district. Yet its name preserves a remarkable sequence of London's past: medieval crafts, parish life, religious conflict and urban destruction and renewal. For such a short street, Rood Lane offers a surprisingly rich journey through nearly a thousand years of City history.
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