Locksmith EC4A: A Street Whose Own Name Stayed Unsettled

EC4A covers Fetter Lane and New Fetter Lane, running between Holborn and Fleet Street at the western edge of the City's legal quarter. The street appears in records as far back as 1252, and by the late 1200s was being called Faitours Lane, or something close to it. What that name actually meant has never been settled.

The historian John Stow believed it came from fewters, old word for idle people who lounged about there. Others trace it instead to faitour, a Middle English term for a cheat or a fortune-telling impostor, which the Oxford English Dictionary treats as the more likely root. Separate theories point to felters, who made felt nearby, or feuterers, keepers of hunting dogs. A persistent folk explanation ties the name to fetters, claiming criminals were once kept chained here, and it isn't pure invention: a gibbet genuinely stood at the Fleet Street end in the 1590s. No single theory has ever won out over the rest.

A Society That Needed No Guesswork At All

Not everything about this street is uncertain. At number 33, a religious community called the Fetter Lane Society was formally established in 1738, bringing together members committed to discipleship and mutual accountability. It went on to support missionary work, and a Moravian chapel has stood on the site, carrying the street's connection to the society forward in a way its own name never managed.

So Fetter Lane has spent centuries arguing with itself over where its name came from, while quietly hosting something whose founding date nobody disputes at all. We'd rather deal in the second kind of certainty. A lock either secures a door properly or it doesn't, whatever story gets told about the street outside it.