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Monument Types

• TOWN GATE (MEDIEVAL - 1066 AD to 1539 AD (between))
• TOWN GATE (POST MEDIEVAL - 1540 AD to 1900 AD (between))

Associated Events

• Foregate (sewer relining) (Ref: WCM100245)
• City Wall/Foregate, Hopmarket (Ref: WCM100255)
• Cellar, Anderson and Virgo (Ref: WCM100425)
• Corner Sansome Street/Foregate (Ref: WCM100447)
• Watching brief, The Foregate (drainage trench) (Ref: WCM100740)
• Watching brief, City Centre CCTV 2000 (Ref: WCM100752)

Full description

City gate, part of the medieval defences (WCM 96100).

First mentioned in a survey of cathedral property in 1182, and referred to in 1229 as the North Gate. Early Corporation documentation refers to the employment of a gate porter. The gate house was repaired after the Civil War and the ground outside was levelled (Beardsmore suggests this is a reference to the removal of Royalist stockades outside). The gates were re-made and re-hung, and a staircase taken down ‘for the convenience of hanging the foregates’. Beardsmore suggests this may refer to an external staircase {1}. It was demolished in 1702 (by which time it was in a dangerous condition) to make room for the City Workhouse (WCM 96075) {2} {3} {4}.

The gate appears on Speed’s map of 1610 and again on the various editions of the 1651 map. Vaughan’s 1660 edition of the latter depicts the gate as a three-storey building (two storeys over the carriageway).

A documentary record from the Chamber and Common Council in June 1567 refers to the gate as 'the tower', possibly suggesting that it was a single rather than double tower. {7}

WCM 100245, a three metre-square hole in the centre of the road, encountered curving sandstone footings that probably belong to the east gate tower, close to the modern street surface, which shows a slight but distinct rise over the site of the gate. WCM 100740, another excavation in the roadway a few metres to the north, found a roughly NE-SW masonry footing possibly representing part of a bridge foundation associated with the city ditch (WCM 96138, WCM 96139).

Monitoring of CCTV cable trenches in 2000-2001 (? WCM 100752) showed a series of east-west sandstone and brick walls under the east side of the roadway representing the east frontage buildings pre-dating street widening in the 1890s {5}.

Gwilliam (1993) noted that the Hop Market Hotel jutted out into the Foregate until the street was widened in the 1890s, and asserted that ‘excavations for the building of the new hotel showed that the city wall ran roughly on a line with the old Foregate entry to the hotel yard’ {6}. This statement appears to need revision in the light of WCM 100245 that suggests that the gate lay opposite the south end of the Hop Market site, the city wall having run along or close inside its southern boundary. The Hop Market entrance appears not to have moved in the rebuilding, being shown by the 18th-century plans and 1st edition O.S. opposite the Berkeley’s Hospital entrance, as it still is.

add further comment on WBs on street works

Cross-reference to: 96115, city wall (line of), Trinity Gate – North Gate
Cross-reference to: 96117, city wall (line of), North Gate – Angel Place
Cross-reference to: 96069, Berkeley’s Hospital

Sources and further reading

Related records

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