Highgate

Why is Highgate called Highgate?

In brief: Highgate is named for a gate into the medieval Bishop of London’s deer park, where travellers paid to take the road north.

Name chain: medieval park boundary and gate → a toll road through the Bishop’s land → the hamlet at the gate → Highgate Village → Highgate station.

Transport context: a Great Northern steam station opened below the village in 1867; today’s deeper Northern line platforms opened beneath it in 1941.

Explore related road and crossing names →

The modern journey into Highgate begins by going down. Escalators carry Northern line passengers below Archway Road, while above the ticket hall an older railway lies in a deep wooded cutting. Above that again, up the hill, is the village that supplied both stations with their name. The layers seem to point towards height, yet the oldest part of the story is not simply a hill. It is a gate.

That gate stood at the edge of a medieval hunting park belonging to the Bishop of London. The bishops held the manor of Hornsey and kept a broad tract of wooded ground for deer. A route through it offered travellers a useful road north, but passage was controlled and tolled. A settlement grew around the threshold. Long before the railway cut into the ridge, “Highgate” described the place where road, boundary and payment met.[1][2]

The first syllable needs care. It has long been understood as the ordinary word “high”, a natural reading for a village crowning one of north London’s ridges. Hornsey Historical Society gives a more specialised explanation: an Old English hæg, a hedge or enclosure, joined to geat, a gate. On that reading the original sense was a hedge-gate into the enclosed park, and the hill later made “high gate” seem obvious. The Society dates the name’s appearance in records to about 1318.[1]

The surviving evidence securely supports the gate, the enclosure and the toll. It is less decisive about how medieval speakers heard the first element. The honest answer therefore keeps both possibilities visible: Highgate may preserve a hedge-gate that was reshaped by the conspicuous height of the place, while the familiar “high gate” interpretation fits the later landscape perfectly.

The Bishop’s park

The park came before the village. Camden’s conservation appraisal places the hamlet at the south-eastern corner of the Bishop of London’s medieval estate and records hunting there from 1227 until church lands were confiscated under Henry VIII. Hornsey Historical Society describes the enclosure as stretching from the Highgate Gatehouse towards the Spaniards and East Finchley, with gates controlling entry at several points.[1][3]

To a medieval traveller the boundary was not picturesque. A gated road decided whether a cart, rider or drove of animals could take the more direct route across private land. Camden’s account dates the opening of the northern route as a toll road to 1386. It climbed through Highgate and crossed the bishop’s park towards Finchley Common. The older road by Hornsey, Crouch End and Muswell Hill could become difficult in wet weather; the park road offered an alternative, at a price.[3][4]

The gate made an address out of an interruption. Roads converged nearby: Highgate Hill from London, the way north, Hampstead Lane, West Hill and Southwood Lane. Where travellers paused, services followed. A hermitage and chapel appeared; inns took advantage of passing trade. By 1553 Camden records five licensed inns in Highgate. The toll point had become a village focus.[3]

Henry Smith pays the toll

The Survey of London preserves a small piece of accounting that brings the gate to life. The bishops did not always collect each coin themselves. They leased the right to take tolls for a fixed annual payment. In 1408–09 Henry Smith, described as “farmer of the tolls of the Park”, paid 30 shillings on 1 March and another 60 shillings through John Ellis on 16 July. In 1420–21 William Payable paid 66 shillings and eight pence for the year’s farm.[2]

Those entries do not tell us who passed on a particular morning, but they reveal the mechanism behind the name. Smith paid for the chance to collect many smaller payments from unknown travellers. The gate was an income stream attached to a road. Its economic value was large enough to enter the bishop’s accounts and stable enough to be leased from year to year.

The toll survived for centuries. The Gatehouse beside it changed, and the arch itself was eventually removed, but the name had already escaped the structure. It labelled the hamlet, then the village, then the surrounding district. Highgate became one of those London names whose original object could disappear without taking the word with it.

A village above London

Height still mattered, even if it was not the whole origin of the name. Highgate’s ridge offered cleaner air, springs and long views over London. From the sixteenth century it attracted country houses as well as travellers. Camden’s appraisal describes ribbon development along Highgate Hill in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the wealthy building retreats beyond the crowded city.[3]

The same slope that sold fresh air made movement difficult. Coaches laboured up Highgate Hill, and traffic concentrated around the crest. In the 1820s Thomas Telford’s Archway Road created an easier bypass on the route towards the north-west. The new road diverted through traffic below the old village and reduced the gate’s command of the journey.[5]

This separation is still legible. Highgate Village sits uphill and west of the station that bears its name. The station stands on Archway Road, closer to the route that avoided the historic centre. The railway did not arrive at the medieval gate; it borrowed the established name from a place above it.

Steam in the cutting

The first Highgate station opened on 22 August 1867. The Edgware, Highgate and London Railway had been authorised in 1862 to build from Finsbury Park towards Edgware, but the Great Northern Railway absorbed the company before services began. At Highgate the engineers drove their line through tunnels and exposed it between them in a deep cutting beneath Archway Road.[5][6]

That landscape is the subject of this chapter’s illustration. It is an original editorial evocation rather than a reconstruction of a single photograph: a steam train, brick platforms and wooded banks suggest the station’s early years. The broad facts are secure—the cutting, the two original side platforms, tunnels and steam service—but small architectural and human details are interpretive.[6]

The station’s position created a striking inversion. A railway named for Highgate was physically lower than the high road and village. Approaching passengers could arrive by train and still face the climb towards the historic centre. The old name now joined two kinds of engineered passage: the medieval gate across a road and the Victorian cutting through a ridge.

The line soon developed branches towards High Barnet and Alexandra Palace. The Highgate site was rebuilt in the 1880s with an island platform, while suburban competition changed around it. Trams, buses and a separate deep-level railway offered more direct journeys. The 1907 tube terminus called Highgate was not here at all: it was the station now known as Archway. The duplicated name became an inconvenience waiting for another scheme to resolve it.[5][6]

A station under a station

In 1935 the London Passenger Transport Board announced the Northern Heights programme. It intended to absorb the existing suburban railways north of Highgate into the Underground, electrify them and connect them with new tunnels. At Highgate, deep platforms would sit beneath the older surface station, linking the Northern line from Archway with East Finchley and the branches beyond.[7]

Work advanced as war approached. Northern line trains ran through the new tunnels from Archway to East Finchley from July 1939, initially passing the unfinished Highgate platforms. The deep-level station opened on 19 January 1941. Above it, steam trains continued to call at the surface platforms. For a time Highgate was literally two stations stacked together.[6][7]

The larger plan did not survive intact. Wartime interruption stopped parts of the electrification, and post-war priorities shifted. The intended network towards Alexandra Palace and Edgware was never completed as an Underground system. The surface branch lost its passenger service in July 1954, leaving the deep Northern line station as the ordinary public Highgate.[6][7]

This incomplete junction gives the station an unusual archaeological quality. Passengers use the working platforms below, while remnants of the older railway remain above: platforms, buildings, trackbed and tunnel mouths. The site did not move from railway to Underground in one clean replacement. One layer continued, another closed, and both preserved the same borrowed village name.

The line becomes a walk

Closure did not erase the railway’s shape. Parts of the former route between Finsbury Park, Highgate, Cranley Gardens and Alexandra Palace were converted into the Parkland Walk. What had been a transport corridor became a linear nature reserve, carrying walkers and cyclists through cuttings once filled with steam and suburban trains.[5][6]

The change makes an apt final layer. Medieval woodland was enclosed for deer. A road was admitted through it and charged at a gate. A railway then cut through the wooded ridge, only for part of its abandoned formation to return to trees, bats and foot traffic. None of these landscapes is simply the original one restored. Each reuses the line left by an earlier movement.

TfL still identifies Highgate as a Northern line station in Zone 3, between Archway and East Finchley.[8] Its working identity is uncomplicated on the map. The place itself is not. A passenger can leave the deep platforms, pass beneath remnants of the surface railway and climb towards a village whose name remembers an even older control point.

What the name remembers

Highgate sounds like a description of elevation, and today it works as one. The village is high; the road climbs; views open southwards. But the stronger historical clue is the second word. A gate once regulated passage into the Bishop of London’s park and produced toll income from the north road.

The possible hæg, or hedge, adds a useful warning. Place-names are not always coined in the form later speakers think they hear. The ridge may have helped an unfamiliar medieval element settle into the transparent word “high”. What can be said without forcing the evidence is that enclosure, gate, road and height all became entangled in the surviving name.

The station inherited that name in 1867, then carried it underground in 1941. Stand beneath Archway Road now and Highgate’s title spans three levels of London history: a deep electric railway, a disused steam line and a hilltop village. Beneath all three is the smallest structure of the story—a gate in a hedge where somebody stopped travellers and asked them to pay.

Notes and Sources

1. “A Brief History of Highgate”, Hornsey Historical Society. Gives the specialist hæg/geat interpretation, the c.1318 record, the Bishop of London’s deer park and toll. Accessed 10 September 2026.
2. “The Gatehouse Tavern”, Survey of London, vol. 17, ed. Percy Lovell and William McB. Marcham (London County Council, 1936), pp. 103–104. Records the gate into the Bishop’s park and the 1408–09, 1420–21 and later farms of tolls. Accessed 10 September 2026.
3. “Highgate Conservation Area Appraisal and Management Strategy”, London Borough of Camden. Covers topography, the Bishop’s estate, the 1386 toll road, early settlement, inns and later development. PDF accessed 10 September 2026.
4. Ian Murray, “How Highgate Developed”, Hornsey Historical Society, reproduced from the Hornsey Journal. Describes the park, the older route, the toll road and historical name forms. Accessed 10 September 2026.
5. “History”, Friends of the Parkland Walk. Covers Telford’s bypass, the 1862 railway authorisation, opening in 1867, the Northern Heights works, closure and reuse of the formation. Accessed 10 September 2026.
6. Nick Catford, “Highgate Station”, Disused Stations, with its cited railway-history bibliography. Records the opening date, deep-cutting layout, rebuilds, surviving fabric and 1954 passenger closure. Accessed 10 September 2026.
7. “Northern Line”, Grace’s Guide to British Industrial History. Summarises the 1935 Northern Heights programme and dates the deep-level Highgate station’s opening to 19 January 1941. Accessed 10 September 2026.
8. “Highgate Underground Station”, Transport for London. Confirms the current Northern line station and Zone 3 status. Accessed 10 September 2026.