Rebels died under a dropped portcullis at this gate

Rebels stormed the gate this ground once carried

You are standing on the site of a killing box. In 1471 a force of roughly 5,000 men under Thomas Neville, the self-styled Bastard of Fauconberg, stormed this gate trying to spring Henry VI from the Tower. The defenders let them push through, then dropped the portcullis mid-charge, trapping the rearmost attackers inside the gate structure and killing them where they stood — more or less underfoot from where you are now.

Ninety years earlier the gate had opened the other way. In 1381 thousands of rebels of the Peasants' Revolt poured through Aldgate into the City, tearing through the streets you're standing among. Geoffrey Chaucer was living in rooms directly above the gate at the time and would have felt the crowd pass beneath his floor.

None of that structure survives above ground, but its footprint does: the Roman Wall of London gate is thought to have run beneath the pavement here, its northern edge under 1–2 Aldgate High Street and its southern under numbers 88–89, before being pulled down in 1761. The medieval gate that replaced it — the one Neville's men died in, the one the rebels broke through — stood on the same line, at this junction of Aldgate High Street and Jewry Street.

The Great Fire reached this parish too. Bills of Mortality for St Botolph Aldgate parish recorded five deaths from fright during the fire — an unusually high toll for that specific cause, a small sign of the panic that reached this far east even though the flames themselves largely stopped short of here.

The building above you today is Aldgate House, and just beside it the entrance to Aldgate underground station has stood since November 1876 — the Circle line's eastern approach and the Metropolitan line's terminus, opened on the same ground where the medieval gate once stood.

A timber inn survived the fire that reshaped this street

A hundred and fifty metres off, the Hoop and Grapes is one of the few timber-framed buildings in London to have come through the Great Fire intact, built in 1593 with a cellar reputed to reach back to the 13th century — a rare surviving texture of what this street looked like before 1666.

A short walk southwest, Holy Trinity Priory was founded around 1108 by Queen Matilda of Scotland, one of the great religious houses of medieval London, its ground now marked only by a memorial near Priory of the Holy Trinity where the buildings once stood.

Further along, 263 metres has held continuous services since 1701, the oldest synagogue in Britain still in regular use — a long unbroken thread running parallel to the gate's history of forced entries and closures.

A different kind of dark history sits just north: the Goulston Street graffito, a chalked sentence found beside a scrap of evidence during the Jack the Ripper investigation, its meaning argued over for more than a century.

More recent grief is marked closer in — 349 metres remembers Paul Butt, Danielle Carter and Tom Casey, who died on 10 April 1992 when an IRA bomb devastated the Baltic Exchange building.

Roman clay carried a wall, a gate and a city

Wider still, the Tower of London stands under a kilometre southwest, itself the site of a 1460 siege during the Wars of the Roses and centuries of executions — the same current of London violence that runs through Aldgate's own gate history. Roman London shows up in fragments all around: a basilica, a temple on Gracechurch Street, and stretches of the old London Wall itself turning up in cellars and scheduled monuments across the City.

Under all of it lies Thames Group clay and sand, laid down some 40 to 56 million years ago — the soft ground that let Roman and medieval Londoners dig ditches, found gates, and eventually bury a city's rubble in the Houndsditch that still bears the name.

If you walk south from here, Mitre Square is where one of the Ripper's victims was found in 1888, a short walk that closes the loop on the darker seam running through this whole stretch of the East End's edge.