Shakespeare's Southwark: Bankside, the Globe and Tate Modern in London

From bear-pits and playhouses to a power station full of art: London's old pleasure quarter across the Thames, where Shakespeare, Chaucer, Keats and the boy Dickens all left their mark

London · 12 stops · 30 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. 1. Millennium Bridge: Crossing to the Wrong Side of the River

   Peter's Hill, London EC4V 3QH, United Kingdom

   Start at the City end of the Millennium Bridge, with the dome of St Paul's at your back, and look south across the water. A thin blade of steel runs ahead of you, hung from cables that sag alongside the deck instead of soaring above it, and on the far bank a brick tower with a single chimney stands like an exclamation mark. That bank is Bankside, and for most of London's history it was the wrong side of the river.

   In Shakespeare's day the City behind you was run by sober merchants and aldermen who saw playhouses as nests of plague, idleness and disorder. So the theatres went where the City's rules did not reach. Much of Bankside belonged to the Bishop of Winchester, and his liberty became London's pleasure ground: playhouses, bear-baiting rings, taverns and brothels, a short boat ride from respectability. Londoners crossed by the only bridge, London Bridge, or more often hailed a waterman with a shout of Eastward ho or Westward ho, and were rowed across.

   This bridge was the first new crossing of the Thames in central London since Tower Bridge in 1894, and it opened on 10 June 2000. Within hours, it began to sway. As thousands of people walked over, the deck swung gently from side to side; walkers instinctively fell into step with the movement to keep their balance, and that made it worse. The newspapers christened it the Wobbly Bridge, and it was closed after just two days.

   The engineers had met a phenomenon they called synchronous lateral excitation, and the cure took almost two years and around five million pounds: dozens of dampers, like giant shock absorbers, tucked away beneath the deck. It reopened in February 2002 and has been steady ever since. It was designed by Foster and Partners with the sculptor Anthony Caro and the engineers Arup, as a blade of light across the river... and in the film of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Death Eaters twist it into the Thames.

   Walk across now, slowly, and glance back from the middle: the bridge frames St Paul's like a picture, which is exactly what it was designed to do. Four hundred years ago you would have made this crossing in a wherry, among hundreds of watermen's boats. At the far end, turn right, towards the huge brick building with the chimney.

2. 2. Tate Modern: A Power Station Full of Art

   Bankside, London SE1 9TG, United Kingdom

   Stand on the lawn in front of Tate Modern and follow the chimney up: ninety-nine metres of brick, kept deliberately a little lower than the dome of St Paul's across the river, so that the cathedral would still rule the skyline. Before it was an art gallery, this building was a power station, and for about thirty years it burned oil to keep London's lights on.

   Its architect was Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, a man who seemed to design half of Britain's twentieth century: Liverpool's Anglican cathedral, Battersea Power Station and, most famously of all, the red telephone box. Bankside Power Station began generating in the early 1950s and closed in 1981, when soaring oil prices made it too expensive to run. For almost twenty years it stood dark and empty on the riverside, and plenty of people expected the bulldozers.

   Instead the Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron turned it into a national gallery of modern art, which opened in May 2000. Their masterstroke was to keep the Turbine Hall, where the generators once roared, as one vast empty space, five storeys high and as long as a street. Artists have filled it with an artificial sun glowing through mist, a crack running the length of the floor, giant spiral slides, and a hundred million porcelain sunflower seeds, every one painted by hand in China.

   In 2016 a twisted pyramid of brick lattice, the Blavatnik Building, was added at the back, with a viewing terrace on top. It started a very modern London quarrel. Residents of the glass-walled flats next door objected that thousands of visitors were peering into their living rooms, and in 2023 the Supreme Court agreed that the platform was a legal nuisance... a case now studied by every law student in the country.

   The gallery changed this whole riverbank. In the 1990s Bankside was warehouses and empty wharves; today the riverside path is a crowded promenade again, which is exactly what it was four centuries ago, when Londoners came over the water to be entertained. Now head east along the river, with the water on your left. Just past the bridge, a row of old houses hides a little plaque with a very good story... and a very big fib.

3. 3. Shakespeare's Globe and the House Wren Never Lived In

   21 New Globe Walk, London SE1 9DT, United Kingdom

   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.

4. 4. The Rose and the Bear Gardens: Bankside's First Playhouse

   56 Park Street, London SE1 9AR, United Kingdom

   At the bottom of Bear Gardens, turn left into Park Street and find the doorway of the Rose Playhouse, tucked into the base of a modern office block. Inside, in a dark basement, a line of red lights traces the outline of a small, many-sided theatre on the ground below. These are the remains of the Rose, built in 1587, the first playhouse on Bankside.

   The Rose was the venture of Philip Henslowe, a businessman with a finger in everything from property to pawnbroking, whose account book, known as his diary, survives at Dulwich College. It is one of the most precious documents of English theatre: takings, loans to writers, costumes bought and sold. On this small stage the star actor Edward Alleyn thundered through Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus, and the diary records a Henry VI play and Titus Andronicus, usually taken to be early work by a young writer from Stratford.

   The remains were found in 1989, when a developer dug the foundations of an office block. Actors including Peggy Ashcroft, Ian McKellen and Dustin Hoffman joined the crowds who came to protest, and the building went ahead, redesigned to stand over the site instead of destroying it. In the old yard, archaeologists found the ground littered with nutshells and fruit pips, the snacks of an Elizabethan audience.

   The lane you came down remembers the other show in town. Around here stood the bear-baiting rings, where chained bears were set upon by dogs while the crowd bet on the outcome. Queen Elizabeth herself enjoyed the sport, and the bear-pits competed for the very same pennies as the playhouses; Henslowe and Alleyn ended up running the bears as well. A famous stage direction in The Winter's Tale reads Exit, pursued by a bear... and some scholars have wondered whether a real one ever lumbered on.

   Henslowe's toughest rival soon appeared just around the corner. In 1599 Shakespeare's company built a bigger, newer playhouse a stone's throw to the east, and within a few years the Rose was losing its audiences; Henslowe and Alleyn moved their players north of the river. Walk on east along Park Street and cross Southwark Bridge Road. The ground on the far side is where the Globe really stood.

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

   34 Park Street, London SE1 9EF, United Kingdom

   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.

6. 6. Clink Street: A Bishop's Palace and London's Most Notorious Prison

   Clink Street, London SE1 9DG, United Kingdom

   Stand in the shadowy canyon of Clink Street, between tall Victorian warehouses, and look up at the ruined gable wall with its great round window, a rose of stone tracery hanging in mid-air. It is almost all that survives of Winchester Palace, the London home of the Bishops of Winchester for some five hundred years and one of the grandest houses in medieval London.

   Those bishops were the landlords of Bankside's pleasures. Their liberty, known as the Clink, licensed the riverside brothels, the stews, and the women who worked in them were nicknamed Winchester Geese. Shakespeare uses the insult in Henry VI Part One, where one nobleman hurls it at the Bishop of Winchester himself. The bishops collected the rents, wrote the regulations, and kept a prison of their own, right here, for anyone who broke them.

   The Clink prison held debtors, drunks, brawling apprentices and, as the religious tides turned under the Tudors, Protestant and Catholic prisoners of conscience by turns. It was burned by the Gordon Rioters in 1780 and never rebuilt. Its name has probably outlived it in the language: to be in the clink still means to be locked up, although word historians argue over whether the prison gave us the phrase or the clink of chains gave the prison its name.

   The palace was also a place of feasts and politics. In 1424 the young King James I of Scotland, a prisoner of the English for eighteen years, married Joan Beaufort, niece of the powerful Bishop of Winchester, in the priory church next door, and by tradition the wedding feast was held here. James was a poet too: The Kingis Quair, usually credited to him, tells of a captive who falls in love with a lady glimpsed in a garden below his prison window.

   A little further on, Clink Street opens onto a small dock where a full-size replica of the Golden Hinde floats, the ship in which Francis Drake sailed around the world between 1577 and 1580. It looks impossibly small for the job. Walk past it, and the tower of a great Gothic church rises right in front of you.

7. 7. Southwark Cathedral: Shakespeare's Brother and John Harvard

   London Bridge, London SE1 9DA, United Kingdom

   Go inside the cathedral, walk down the south aisle and stop at the reclining alabaster figure of a man with a quill in his hand, lying beneath a stained-glass window crowded with characters from the plays. This is the Shakespeare memorial, carved in 1912, and the church around it is the closest thing London has to a parish church of the theatre.

   Shakespeare lived on Bankside for a while, and this church, then called St Saviour's, served its playhouse world. On the last day of 1607 his younger brother Edmund, an actor, was buried here, and the register records an expensive tolling of the great bell in the morning... most historians assume William paid for it. Edmund's grave is unmarked, but a stone in the choir remembers him. Philip Henslowe of the Rose lies here too, and so do the playwrights John Fletcher and Philip Massinger.

   Further along the nave lies the far older tomb of John Gower, friend of Geoffrey Chaucer and one of the first great poets to write in English, his painted head resting on three of his own books. He lived in the priory here and died in 1408. Two centuries later Gower walked onto the stage as the narrator of Shakespeare's Pericles... so in this one church, poetry and theatre shake hands across the ages.

   There is an American chapter as well. In November 1607 a butcher's son called John Harvard was baptised here. He grew up in Southwark, emigrated to Massachusetts, died young, and left his library and half his estate to a new college, which took his name. The Harvard Chapel inside commemorates him, and Harvard graduates still come to see where it all began.

   The building itself is older than all of them. A priory church of St Mary Overie stood here from the twelfth century, and its choir is one of the earliest Gothic structures in London, though the church became a cathedral only in 1905. Leave by the south side, cross to Borough High Street and walk south. On the left, a gateway opens into a cobbled yard with an old inn at the back.

8. 8. The George Inn and the Tabard: Where Chaucer's Pilgrims Set Out

   75-77 Borough High Street, London SE1 1NH, United Kingdom

   Turn off Borough High Street into the cobbled yard and look at the long black-and-white building, its wooden galleries stacked one above the other along the upper floors. This is the George, the last galleried coaching inn in London, and it belongs to the National Trust.

   Inns like this once lined Borough High Street, because this was the main road into London from Canterbury, Dover and the Channel ports. Travellers who arrived after the gates of London Bridge had closed for the night slept here and crossed in the morning. The present building dates from 1677, rebuilt after a great fire swept through Southwark the year before. Picture the galleries running all the way round the yard, as they once did: before the purpose-built playhouses, companies of players set up their stages in yards like this, and many historians see the Rose and the Globe as that idea made permanent.

   Now step back to the street and find the narrow passage next door called Talbot Yard. Here stood the Tabard Inn, and here, one April evening in the 1380s, twenty-nine pilgrims gathered for the ride to the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury... at least in the imagination of Geoffrey Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales opens at the Tabard, where the jolly host, Harry Bailly, proposes a contest: each pilgrim will tell stories on the road, and whoever tells the best wins a free supper here on the way home.

   The delicious detail is that the innkeeper was real. A Henry Bailly appears in fourteenth-century records as an innkeeper of Southwark and as one of its members of Parliament. Chaucer, a customs official who seems to have known everybody, dropped a living Londoner straight into his fiction, the way a novelist today might put a well-known landlord into a story about a pub crawl.

   The Tabard, later renamed the Talbot, was pulled down in the 1870s, and the George itself lost most of its galleries to a railway company around the same time. A few doors north stood the White Hart, where Dickens has Mr Pickwick first meet Sam Weller. Walk north to St Thomas Street, turn right, and follow it to the gates of Guy's Hospital.

9. 9. Keats at Guy's Hospital: The Poet Who Trained as a Surgeon

   Great Maze Pond, London SE1 9RT, United Kingdom

   Walk through into the old courtyard of Guy's Hospital and find the stone alcove where a bronze young man sits on a bench, chin in hand, looking as though he has just heard something he would rather not have. There is room beside him; sit down. This is John Keats, and before he was a poet, he was a medical student here.

   Keats enrolled at Guy's in October 1815, aged nineteen, and lodged around the corner in St Thomas Street. He became a dresser, assisting the surgeons on the wards and in the operating theatre, and in July 1816 he passed the examination that licensed him as an apothecary. On paper, he was on his way to a respectable career.

   Think of what that career meant. Surgery in 1815 had no anaesthetic: patients were held down, and surgeons were admired for how fast they could take off a leg. Keats, sensitive and already scribbling verses, found it harder and harder. A friend later remembered him saying that during one lecture a sunbeam came through the window, full of floating specks, and his mind drifted away with them to fairyland.

   By 1817 he had abandoned medicine for poetry. Within three years he had written the great odes, to a Nightingale, on a Grecian Urn, To Autumn, which are still learned by heart all over the world. And in February 1821 he died of tuberculosis in Rome, just twenty-five years old. His training never left him: when he first coughed blood, he recognised its colour, and is said to have called that drop his death warrant.

   The alcove he sits in is a survivor too. It is one of the stone shelters from old London Bridge, added in the eighteenth century and saved when the bridge was demolished in the 1830s. Now head south through the hospital grounds to Long Lane and follow it west. Where it meets Borough High Street, a church with a slender white spire is waiting, and with it a twelve-year-old boy named Charles Dickens.

10. 10. St George the Martyr and the Marshalsea: Dickens's Secret

    Borough High Street, London SE1 1JA, United Kingdom

    Stand by the church of St George the Martyr, with its slim white spire, then step into the little garden just to the north of it. Along one side runs a long, high brick wall. It does not look like much. It is the last surviving wall of the Marshalsea, the debtors' prison where a twelve-year-old boy's world fell apart.

    In February 1824 John Dickens, a cheerful, hopeless clerk in the Navy Pay Office, was arrested for a debt of about forty pounds and locked up in the Marshalsea. His wife and the younger children soon moved in with him, as families often did. His son Charles had already been taken out of school and sent to work ten hours a day in a blacking factory by the Thames, sticking labels on pots of boot polish.

    Charles lodged on his own nearby, and when he could he came to the prison to breakfast with his family before going to work. He hardly told anyone about it, ever. Only after his death, when his friend John Forster published his biography, did readers learn the secret... and realise how much of it had been hidden in plain sight in the novels.

    Because Dickens put the Marshalsea into Little Dorrit, published in the 1850s. Its heroine, Amy Dorrit, is born inside the prison, and this church plays its part in her story: one night she sleeps in its vestry with a burial register for a pillow, and at the end of the novel she is married here. A small kneeling Little Dorrit even appears in one of the church's stained-glass windows.

    The Marshalsea closed in 1842, by which time the boy from the blacking factory was the most famous writer in Britain. Now walk west along Marshalsea Road and turn left into Lant Street, the quiet street where he had his lodging.

11. 11. Lant Street: The Boy Dickens's Paradise

    Lant Street, London SE1 1QP, United Kingdom

    Walk slowly along Lant Street, a modest run of brick terraces with a primary school named after Charles Dickens on one side, and try to strip away two centuries. Picture a back attic in the house of a man who worked for the debtors' court, with a sloping ceiling and a window over a timber yard. In 1824 that attic was home to a twelve-year-old boy, entirely on his own.

    Before Lant Street, young Charles had lodged in Camden Town, miles from his family, and walked into town every day. When a room was found for him here, close enough to share breakfast with his parents in the prison, he later told John Forster that he thought it was a paradise. That one word tells you everything about how lonely the months before it had been.

    Dickens never forgot the street. A dozen years later, in The Pickwick Papers, he lodged the cheerfully disreputable medical student Bob Sawyer in Lant Street, and wrote, with a perfectly straight face, that a kind of repose hung over it which shed a gentle melancholy upon the soul. It is a private joke, aimed at a place only he knew the real meaning of.

    Southwark kept turning up in his books. His father is usually seen as the model for Mr Micawber in David Copperfield, who also lands in a debtors' prison, the King's Bench, which stood a short walk south of here. Again and again Dickens wrote about prisons, debt and abandoned children, and again and again the roots lead back to these few streets and to the months when he was a working boy among the debtors of the Borough.

    The family's troubles ended suddenly: a legacy arrived, John Dickens was released, and before long Charles was back at school. But the boy from Lant Street became the man who changed how Britain looked at its poor. Now head north to Union Street and the corner of Redcross Way, where a pair of iron gates is covered in ribbons.

12. 12. Cross Bones Graveyard: The Outcast Dead

    Redcross Way, London SE1 1TA, United Kingdom

    Stop at the iron gates on Redcross Way and look closely. They are tied with hundreds of ribbons, scraps of fabric, beads, flowers and handwritten names, and a small plaque remembers the outcast dead. Behind them lies a strip of wild garden. This is Cross Bones, a burial ground for the people nobody else would bury.

    The story is that the single women of the Bankside stews, the Winchester Geese you met on Clink Street, were refused burial in consecrated ground and laid here instead. It is an old tradition, mentioned by the antiquarian John Stow around 1600, and historians still debate exactly where and when. What is certain is that by the eighteenth century this was a paupers' graveyard for the parish of St Saviour, so crammed with Southwark's poorest that it was closed in 1853 because it could hold no more.

    In the 1990s, during work for the Jubilee line extension, archaeologists excavated a small part of the site. They found it packed with burials, layered one on top of another, a large share of them babies and young children, and the bones showed the marks of poverty and disease. Estimates of how many people lie here run to around fifteen thousand.

    What happened next is pure Southwark. A local poet and playwright, John Constable, began holding vigils at these gates around the turn of the millennium, inspired by the Winchester Geese, and they have continued ever since, on the twenty-third of every month. Volunteers turned the wasteland into a small memorial garden, and the ribbons on the gates keep multiplying.

    So the walk ends where Bankside's story truly belongs: not only with the playwrights, poets and bishops on the plaques, but with the watermen, actors, bear-keepers and the women of the stews who made this bank of the river London's playground. You started on a bridge built for the new millennium and you finish at a gate tied with ribbons for the forgotten dead. London Bridge station is a short walk to the east.