Thames Maritime Secrets: Tower Bridge, Borough Market, and Southwark Taverns
From Traitors' Gate and Victorian steam engines to Shakespeare's Globe and pirate docklands
London · 7 stops · 10 min audio · Generated
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1. Tower of London & Traitors' Gate: Port of the Condemned
Tower Wharf, London EC3N 4AB
Stand right here on the stone paving of Tower Wharf, resting your arms on the iron railing looking directly down into the murky water beneath the arched stone portal of Traitors' Gate. You are standing outside Her Majesty's Royal Palace and Fortress of the Tower of London, begun by William the Conqueror in ten sixty-six to subjugate the citizens of London.
Notice the heavy portcullis teeth hanging over the water entrance: during the Tudor dynasty, prisoners accused of high treason against the Crown were rowed down the Thames from Westminster Hall in covered black barges. As their oars splashed beneath this arch, prisoners knew they had entered a kingdom from which few returned alive.
A young Princess Elizabeth, the future Queen Elizabeth the First, stepped out of her barge onto these wet stairs in fifteen fifty-four in the pouring rain, arrested by her half-sister Queen Mary. She famously sat down on the cold wet steps, declaring: Here landeth as true a subject, being prisoner, as ever arrived at these stairs!
Look eastward toward the majestic twin neo-Gothic towers of Tower Bridge soaring across the Thames.
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2. Tower Bridge Glass Walkway: Victorian Hydraulic Marvel
Tower Bridge Rd, London SE1 2UP
Walk onto the wide timber pedestrian path of Tower Bridge and look up at the majestic steel lattice suspension chains and Cornish granite towers. Opened in June eighteen ninety-four by the Prince of Wales, this bridge is an engineering triumph: when tall sailing ships approach, its two giant bascules, each weighing over one thousand tons, can pivot open to an angle of eighty-six degrees in just sixty seconds!
Look up forty-two meters above your head at the high-level walkways connecting the towers: today, they feature glass-floored observation decks where visitors look straight down between their shoes at red London double-decker buses crossing below.
In December nineteen fifty-two, number seventy-eight bus driver Albert Gunter was driving his bus across the bridge when the gates suddenly failed to close and the bascules began rising before his eyes! Rather than brake and plummet backward, Gunter stomped on the accelerator, leaped the growing three-foot gap in mid-air, and slammed down safely on the other side, earning a ten-pound bonus for saving his twenty passengers.
Stroll across the river to the southern bank as we follow the Queen's Walk toward the warship HMS Belfast.
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3. HMS Belfast & The Pool of London: Crucible of D-Day
The Queen's Walk, London SE1 2JH
Stop along the Queen's Walk promenade right beside the gray hull of HMS Belfast, resting your hands on the granite river wall. You are looking at the only surviving World War Two Royal Navy cruiser in Europe. Launched in Belfast in nineteen thirty-eight, this eleven-thousand-ton warship bristling with triple six-inch gun turrets served on the most hazardous convoy routes of the war.
In June nineteen forty-four, during Operation Overlord, HMS Belfast was one of the very first warships to open fire on German gun batteries off Gold and Juno beaches during the D-Day invasion of Normandy, firing over four thousand shells in five weeks to support Allied troops advancing inland.
You are standing along the Pool of London, historically the busiest commercial port in the world. Until container docks moved downriver in the nineteen sixties, hundreds of merchant ships from China, India, and the Caribbean anchored right here, offloading tea, tobacco, rum, and spices into Victorian brick wharves.
Continue past London Bridge toward the tantalizing aromas of Borough Market.
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4. Borough Market: A Thousand Years of Food
8 Southwark St, London SE1 1TL
Step beneath the green cast-iron art deco arches of Borough Market and breathe in the rich aromas of roasting coffee, bubbling duck confit, artisan sourdough, and ripe wheels of farmhouse Cheddar cheese. Look around at the historic green ironwork and Victorian brick railway viaducts overhead: food traders have gathered on this exact patch of Southwark riverbank for over one thousand years, since at least ten fourteen.
In medieval times, farmers from Kent and Surrey gathered outside the city walls at the southern foot of London Bridge to sell grain and livestock without paying the heavy tolls charged by the City of London magistrates. The market grew so chaotic that in seventeen fifty-six Parliament closed it down, but Southwark locals raised six thousand pounds to purchase this triangle of land and reopened the market under independent public trustees.
Look up at the rumbling railway lines overhead: in the nineteenth century, railway engineers had to elevate their tracks on viaducts right through the market hall, creating the dramatic urban roofscape where steam trains once whistled above fruit stalls.
Weave through the gourmet food stalls toward the haunting stone ruins of Winchester Palace.
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5. Winchester Palace & The Clink: Sins of Southwark
Pickwick St, London SE1 9DN
Stop right in the cobblestone canyon of Clink Street and look up at the soaring stone wall of Winchester Palace. In the center of the medieval masonry, notice the breathtaking circular thirteenth-century rose window carved from Caen stone with delicate curved triangular tracery. This wall was the great dining hall of the Bishops of Winchester, among the wealthiest and most powerful prelates in England.
Why did the Bishop live south of the Thames? Southwark sat outside the jurisdiction of the puritanical City of London, meaning the Bishop of Winchester legally controlled—and taxed!—all the unlicensed taverns, bear-baiting pits, and brothels in the district. The local courtesans were sardonically known throughout Tudor London as the Winchester Geese.
Just steps along this dark alley stood The Clink, a notorious medieval debtor and heretic prison operational from eleven forty-four until seventeen eighty. The prison was so infamous for iron manacles and extortionate jailers that it became an English slang synonym for jail: being thrown in the clink.
Walk west along Bankside toward the wooden timber frame of Shakespeare's Globe.
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6. Shakespeare's Globe Theatre: The Wooden O
21 New Globe Walk, London SE1 9DT
Stand before the lime-plastered walls and thatched water-reed roof of Shakespeare's Globe on Bankside. Run your hand along one of the heavy English green-oak timber posts: you are standing before the only thatched-roof building permitted in London since the Great Fire of sixteen sixty-six. Opened in nineteen ninety-seven through the relentless passion of American actor Sam Wanamaker, it is a meticulous recreation of the original playhouse built here in fifteen ninety-nine.
Shakespeare famously called this circular playhouse a Wooden O in the prologue to Henry the Fifth. In Tudor times, up to three thousand spectators packed into the yard and galleries. Groundlings paid a single copper penny to stand in the open yard in the mud and rain, munching on hazelnuts and oranges while shouting approval or heaving rotten fruit at actors.
In June sixteen thirteen, during a performance of Henry the Eighth, a theatrical cannon fired from the roof misfired, setting the original dry thatch roof ablaze. The theater burned to the ground in less than an hour! Miraculously, no one was killed, though one unfortunate spectator's breeches caught fire and had to be smothered with a flagon of bottle ale.
Walk onto the silver pedestrian deck of the Millennium Bridge.
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7. Millennium Bridge & Tate Modern: The Wobbly Span to St Paul's
Thames Embankment, London EC4V 3QH
Conclude your journey on the silver aluminum deck of the Millennium Bridge, right at the mid-river lookout. Turn to the north: before you rises Sir Christopher Wren's majestic dome of St Paul's Cathedral, framed perfectly by the bridge's slender suspension cables. Now turn south: the imposing brown brick chimney of Tate Modern rises ninety-nine meters into the clouds, transformed from Sir Giles Gilbert Scott's nineteen forties Bankside Power Station into the world's most visited modern art museum.
Designed by architect Norman Foster and sculptor Anthony Caro, the Millennium Bridge opened on June tenth, two thousand, as London's first new bridge across the Thames in over a century. However, as thousands of pedestrians stepped onto the span, an unexpected synchronous lateral footfall caused the bridge to sway alarmingly from side to side! Londoners instantly christened it the Wobbly Bridge, and it was closed just two days later to install thirty-seven hydraulic dampers.
Look down closely at the aluminum grating under your feet: you might spot miniature paintings created by street artist Ben Wilson, who has spent twenty years transforming discarded chewing gum trodden into the metal into tiny colorful works of art.
As church bells chime across the water and the tide swirls past the bridge piers, you have traversed the seafaring soul of London.