Locksmith EC3N: The Gate A Poet Called Home

EC3N runs along Aldgate and Minories, the old eastern line of the City wall. In May 1374, the City granted Geoffrey Chaucer a lease for life on the dwelling-house built directly above Aldgate itself, rent-free. A month later he was appointed Comptroller of Customs at the nearby port, a short walk from his own front door. He lived in those rooms for the next twelve years, working by day and, by most accounts, writing by candlelight in the evenings. Earlier works like Anelida and Arcite and The House of Fame date from this period. The Canterbury Tales followed close behind, begun not long after his tenancy at Aldgate came to its own abrupt end in 1386, when the rooms were handed to someone else the very next day.

The gate itself eventually came down in 1761, long after its most famous tenant had gone. But for twelve years, one of the most important figures in English literature climbed the same stairs each evening that porters and guards had climbed for generations before him.

A Convent That Answered Only To Rome

Just outside the same gate stood a very different kind of institution. The Abbey of the Minoresses of St Clare was founded in 1293 by Edmund Crouchback, Earl of Lancaster and brother to Edward I, along with his wife Blanche of Navarre, who brought the first nuns over from France. They followed a genuinely austere rule: no meat, no beds, long stretches of silence, and bare feet. Unusually, the abbey answered directly to the Pope rather than the Bishop of London, a privilege that marked it out from almost every other religious house in the City.

The community survived plague, a devastating fire in 1515, and more than two centuries of ordinary City life before the Dissolution finally caught up with it in 1539. Its buildings became an armoury, then a workhouse, and what remained burned down for good in 1797. All that's left today is the name: Minories, still on the map, still marking exactly where the nuns once stood.

A poet's rooms and a convent's chapel, gone now, both still shape how this stretch of the City is known. We work on something smaller but just as practical: keeping the doors here secure, whatever era the building behind them happens to belong to.