Shakespeare's Globe and the House Wren Never Lived In
Why is it significant?
Before you reach the round white theatre, stop at the narrow house squeezed into the terrace beside it: number 49 Bankside, known as Cardinal's Wharf. A plaque on its wall says that Christopher Wren lived here while St Paul's was being built, watching his dome rise across the water.
Key Facts
| Place | Shakespeare's Globe and the House Wren Never Lived In |
|---|---|
| Address | 21 New Globe Walk, London SE1 9DT, United Kingdom |
| Geo Coordinates | 51.50810, -0.09720 |
| Part of Walk | Shakespeare's Southwark: Bankside, the Globe and Tate Modern in London |
| Generated | Generated |
Before you reach the round white theatre, stop at the narrow house squeezed into the terrace beside it: number 49 Bankside, known as Cardinal's Wharf. A plaque on its wall says that Christopher Wren lived here while St Paul's was being built, watching his dome rise across the water. It is a lovely picture... and almost certainly untrue.
Historians who have dug into the deeds, most famously Gillian Tindall in her book The House by the Thames, found that the house dates from around 1710, when the cathedral was all but finished, and the plaque seems to have been brought here from elsewhere much later. The same plaque claims that Catherine of Aragon sheltered on this spot when she first arrived in London in 1502, which is even harder to believe. London loves a good story, and Bankside has always loved one more than most.
Next door stands Shakespeare's Globe, and it too is a brilliant reconstruction built from evidence and educated guesswork. It was the dream of the American actor and director Sam Wanamaker, who came looking for the Globe in 1949 and found only a blackened plaque on a brewery wall. He spent more than twenty years raising money against scepticism and bureaucracy. He died in 1993, and the theatre opened in 1997, a couple of hundred metres from the original site.
It was built the way the Elizabethans built: green oak joined with wooden pegs, lime plaster, and a roof of water-reed thatch, the first thatched roof allowed in London since the Great Fire of 1666, protected by sprinklers along its ridge. Plays run in daylight under the open sky, and the standing audience in the yard, the groundlings, still heckle, cheer and get rained on, much as they did when Hamlet was new.
Shakespeare would recognise the noise but not the river, which in his day was wider, slower, and crowded with the boats that ferried his audiences across. Walk a few steps further east and turn right into the narrow lane called Bear Gardens. The name is not a figure of speech.