Borough & Bermondsey

The old way into London: coaching inns, a thousand-year-old market, and warehouse streets down to Tower Bridge.

The land at the southern end of London Bridge, which for centuries was where you waited to get into the city. Borough High Street was lined with inns where the coaches stopped, and the George, rebuilt in 1677, is the last galleried coaching inn left in London. Borough Market grew up beside it and has been selling food on or near this spot for something close to a thousand years. Bermondsey behind it was made by an abbey founded in 1082, whose monks drained the marsh and embanked the river. What came next was industry of a particularly strong-smelling kind. The tanneries took the hides, and Leathermarket Street and Morocco Street still carry the trade in their names; the food factories took everything else, with Peek Freans baking biscuits here from 1857 and Hartley's boiling jam, so much of it that the district was called the larder of London. Along the water stood three and a half miles of warehouses holding what the ships brought in. Then it stopped. The docks closed, the factories went, and the warehouses stood empty until the 1980s turned Shad Thames and Butler's Wharf into flats and restaurants. What is left is a walk with more texture than almost anywhere in London: the market, Southwark Cathedral, the narrow brick canyon of Shad Thames with its iron bridges overhead, Bermondsey Street's Georgian shopfronts, and an antiques market that opens at dawn on Fridays.