The Anchor and the Lost Globe: Fire, Beer and Dr Johnson

Why is it significant?

Stop outside the Anchor, the old pub where Park Street meets the river, its terraces looking across the Thames towards the City. Then glance back along Park Street, towards Anchor Terrace, the handsome row of houses built in 1834 beside Southwark Bridge Road.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Stop outside the Anchor, the old pub where Park Street meets the river, its terraces looking across the Thames towards the City. Then glance back along Park Street, towards Anchor Terrace, the handsome row of houses built in 1834 beside Southwark Bridge Road. A plaque there marks the site of Shakespeare's original Globe, and a slice of its foundations still survives under the yard behind the terrace.

The Globe was born of a quarrel with a landlord. In the winter of 1598 Shakespeare's company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, was locked in a dispute over the land beneath its old playhouse, the Theatre, in Shoreditch. So, the story goes, over the Christmas holidays the players took the building apart, beam by beam, carried the timbers across the river and raised them again here as the Globe, which opened in 1599. Shakespeare was one of its shareholders, and Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth were written for its stage.

On 29 June 1613, during a performance of Henry VIII, a cannon fired to announce a royal entrance sent sparks into the thatch. Within an hour the whole theatre was gone. Nobody died, though one man's breeches caught fire and, according to a letter written a few days later, were put out with a bottle of ale. A second Globe, with a tiled roof this time, rose on the same foundations the next year, and played on until the Puritans closed the theatres in 1642.

Then came the beer. Henry Thrale's Anchor Brewery spread across this ground, and Thrale's house beside it became a second home for Samuel Johnson, the author of the great Dictionary, who had his own room there. When Thrale died in 1781, Johnson, as one of his executors, helped to sell the business, and told the bidders they were buying not a parcel of boilers and vats, but the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice. As Barclay Perkins, it became one of the largest breweries in the world.

And on 2 September 1666 the diarist Samuel Pepys sheltered in a little alehouse on Bankside and watched the Great Fire devour the City across the water, a horrid, malicious, bloody flame, as he wrote that night. The Anchor likes to think it was the one. Nobody can prove it, but the view is right. Now follow the narrow street east, under the railway bridge, into the shadowy canyon of Clink Street.