A street that is found near Liverpool Street Station in London.
Try to imagine it as it once was. It is now a fairly anonymous street full of office buildings and coffee shops.
It existed in Roman times as well, but in the Middle Ages it was surrounded by a ditch that was originally built as part of the city defences but was later used to bury dead dogs. Apparently the ditch was the moat outside the Roman walls.
Photo: Basher Eyre / Houndsditch at dusk
As a result, the place is known as Houndsditch.
It was not an urban legend; in fact, numerous dog skeletons were discovered during excavations in 1989.
When you walk from Houndsditch to Bishopgate, you will notice areas of land with no buildings; these were the location of the plague’s mass graves.
Dr. Thomas Barnardo discovered ten children on the side of the road holding each other warm in Houndsditch.
This event persuaded him to open the first of many orphanages in Stepney called Barnardo’s.
Back then, the street was teeming with small textile factories with deplorable working conditions.
When three police officers tried to intervene during a jewelry robbery in Houndsditch in 1910, a group of Latvian anarchists (yes, from Latvia) killed them.
Houndsditch Warehouse was a major local department store that primarily sold clothing until 1986.
The warehouse, like those on nearby Petticoat Lane, was Jewish-owned and open on Sundays long before it became the norm elsewhere.
