Southwark is changing fast. Criss-crossed and parcelled up by railway lines to London, it can feel disjointed and subterranean – a place to hurry through. But since the closing of the docks and the regeneration of the riverside, much accelerated after Bankside Power Station became Tate Modern in 2000, the area has regained its status as a leisure destination. Bankside, with the reconstructed Globe Theatre, Borough Market, Tate Modern and Southwark Cathedral, now draws millions of visitors each year, though sanitized since Shakespeare’s day when attractions included brothels, bull and bear baiting.
Margaret Willes charts the changing fortunes of Southwark in an immensely skilled and polished work that takes Southwark Cathedral as its cornerstone. Her book is broadly chronological; thematic chapters trace the area’s rich history from Roman times. She begins by setting the scene, explaining that Southwark always had strategic importance. The southern approach to London Bridge, the city’s only river crossing until 1750, had to be defended. To help enforce law and order, Tudor and Stuart rulers impaled the heads of traitors on its southern gate until 1660.
The book covers Southwark’s traditional industries: hat-making, tanning, and brewing; its commercial activity, including Borough Market, which now specializes in artisan food but echoes earlier markets and Southwark’s famous fair; its strong connections with literary figures, including Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Dickens; its role in the history of the English Bible and scriptural study; its importance as a medical centre, being home to Guy’s hospital and formerly to St Thomas’s; its links to colonization, as the place from which dissenting ministers fled to New England in the 1630s, including John Lothropp whose descendants include at least six US presidents and Clint Eastwood, and John Harvard, who left a fortune to the University that bears his name; and the gloomy history of Southwark’s prisons, mostly housing debtors.
Willes weaves these topics together, linking them to the cathedral, and especially to its monuments. Even when the cathedral lacks a tribute – as in the case of John Keats – a link is made by noting the absence itself. This device works well, allowing Willes to bring the story into the twenty-first century by explaining how the 2017 terrorist attack in Borough Market affected the Cathedral’s stray cat, Doorkins. It came to the door for food each morning, but after the attack never left the building.
This book is peopled with characters. A stained-glass window in the cathedral shows Harry Bailly, keeper of the Tabard in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales but identifiable to contemporaries with an innkeeper of the same name. Its north transept has a monument to quack physician Lionel Lockyer, who claimed his miraculous pills included sunbeams and grew rich. Parish records also reference the silk weaver Reasonable Blackman, of West African origin, who worshipped in the 1570s.
Southwark was unruly. It was outside the governance of the City and attracted immigrants, able to work where City regulations did not reach. Possible consequences are neatly encapsulated in a 1622 petition when local leatherdressers complained that Dutch rivals hired their countrymen who had not served a seven-year apprenticeship and were enticing English apprentices to their workshops who had no wish to finish their term. It might have been legal, but the Dutch were taking all the work.
Willes describes the impact of rail travel on Southwark. Land was cheap, opposition to the demolition of housing tokenistic. From the mid-nineteenth century, railway viaducts stretched into Surrey and Kent. These ‘pathways in the sky’ remain a striking feature of Southwark today. One macabre development was the London Necropolis railway, used in the 1860s to carry some 8,000 corpses displaced by the building of the Charing Cross line to an overspill cemetery near Woking. The train had a special station near Waterloo and carried first, second, and third class passengers as well as coffins, also divided into different classes. The line closed in 1945.
Southwark has been overlooked. Now regeneration is extending into its hinterland; the railway arches are being reconceived as retail and dining spaces. ‘Borough Yards’, next to the market, also houses a gallery, cinema, and office spaces. It reinstates a north-south route given the Elizabethan name ‘Dirty Lane’, although the original was differently located.
Southwark is no longer London’s back door but a vibrant part of the capital. Willes’s fine book is a celebration of this.
