Abbey Street

Abbey Street in Bermondsey runs along one of the most significant medieval corridors in London. The ground beneath the tarmac is monastery: the east–west line of the street follows the nave and chancel of Bermondsey Abbey’s church almost exactly, and the surrounding streets — Grange Walk, Long Walk, Bermondsey Square — still trace the edges of cloister and courtyard as the monks left them in 1537.

The street itself is only about two centuries old, but the ground it occupies is a thousand years older. That gap between name and street is the story: the abbey that gave Abbey Street its identity had been rubble for three centuries before the road was ever built.

The rubble the street was cut through belonged to Bermondsey Abbey — the Cluniac Priory of St Saviour, founded in the 1080s on the south bank of the Thames. As documented by British History Online, the Abbey of Bermondsey is now kept in remembrance mainly by the names given to a few streets which cover its site. Abbey Street is the most direct of those memorials: it was originally called Great George Street, but was renamed to commemorate the monastery whose nave it follows. The name is verified — there is no ambiguity about which institution it records.

Bermondsey Priory was founded on the south bank of the Thames in the 1080s, and it became a centre of pilgrimage. In 1399 the priory’s status was raised to that of an abbey — one of the wealthiest Cluniac houses in England, controlling estates across Surrey, Kent, and beyond. Two queens of England died within its walls: Catherine of Valois, widow of Henry V, in 1437, and Elizabeth Woodville, widow of Edward IV, in 1492. At the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII, the abbey was forcibly surrendered and its estate passed to Sir Thomas Pope, who demolished much of it and built Bermondsey House on the site.

When the street was cut in 1808, contemporaries were not impressed. A correspondent in the Gentleman’s Magazine that year complained that the Bermondsey residents had “contrived a new road of no perceptible use or convenience through the very heart of the existing walls of the Abbey” and that the principal gateway had been demolished for the purpose. The protest was ignored. Within decades the street was flanked by the tanneries and leather mills that would define Bermondsey for the next century — notably Neckinger Mills, formerly Bevington & Sons, one of the most famous tanneries in Bermondsey, whose pits beside the River Neckinger processed light leathers for shoes and fancy goods.

The most persistent presence on Abbey Street is archaeological. Excavations by MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology) on the Bermondsey Abbey site between 1984 and 1995 uncovered the eastern parts of the church, cloister and inner court, along with the monastic cemetery — revealing a detailed picture of the 12th-century building programme and its later expansion. The abbey site is a Scheduled Ancient Monument. At the corner of Abbey Street and Bermondsey Street, the church of St Mary Magdalen stands on the site of the ancient conventual church, making it the oldest surviving building in Bermondsey.

Abbey Street today is a mixed residential and commercial road in the heart of Bermondsey’s historic street grid. The layout around it — Bermondsey Square, Grange Walk, Long Walk — still traces the medieval abbey precinct with remarkable fidelity, a fact visible on any map. The antiques market at Bermondsey Square, established on the site of the abbey’s inner courtyard, draws traders and buyers every Friday morning.