It was first built in Roman times and marked the beginning of Ermine Street, the ancient road running from London to York (Eboracum).

The site of this former gate is marked by a stone bishop's mitre, fixed high upon a building located near Bishopsgate's junction with Wormwood Street, by the gardens there and facing the Heron Tower.

[7] The ward is divided into two parts by the line of the former London Wall and gate which lay just north of Wormwood and Camomile Streets.

Bishopsgate Street had recently been paved, making the site convenient for Pindar's business activities in East Anglia.

Bishopsgate Without was a very densely populated neighbourhood, prior to the opening (1874) and later expansion (1891) of Liverpool Street station, which now dominates the area.

St Helen's is a historic medieval church and former monastic establishment with many ancient funerary monuments and a stained glass window commemorating William Shakespeare, a local parishioner in the early to mid-1590s.

Although it takes its name from the gate, the road pre-dates the building of the London Wall which was built in the late second or early third centuries.

Ermine Street (sometimes called the Old North Road) connected London to Cambridge, Lincoln, York and other towns and cities.

The earliest origins of the wards reach back further than the 11th century but their emergence and evolution is uncertain and any narrative conjectural.

[24] The ward may have developed from the Soke of Bishopsgate, a set of rights, and possibly land, held by the Bishop of London over an area to the east of the River Walbrook.

The Bishop may have been granted the land and rights in order to promote growth in the under-developed part of the city east of the Walbrook.

[26] The Domesday Survey of 1086 did not cover London, but a landholding called Bishopsgate is recorded nearby; this may have been the property later known as Norton Folgate.

[27] Bishopsgate had many coaching inns which accommodated passengers setting out on the originally Roman Ermine Street, that issued from the gate.

These included the Angel, the Black Bull, the Dolphin, the Flower Pot, the Green Dragon, the Magpie and Punchbowl, the White Hart and the Wrestlers.

[28] The English politician Anthony Bacon moved nearby with his mother in May 1594 and she complained about the plays and interludes at the Bull which might "corrupt his servants".

[30] The 17th century façade of Sir Paul Pindar's House on Bishopsgate, demolished, with many other old buildings, for the expansion of Liverpool Street railway station in 1890, was also preserved and can now be seen in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

In 1649, during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, Colonel Whalley's Regiment, a parliamentary unit, was stationed in Bishopsgate Ward, helping to protect London from Royalists.

A surrender was eventually negotiated, but Robert Lockyer a parishioner of Bishopsgate Without as well as a soldier in the regiment, was executed as a ringleader.

The Communist Manifesto was first printed, anonymously and in German, by the Workers Educational Association at 46 Liverpool Street in Bishopsgate Without in 1848.