Anchor Street

The anchor symbol — and by extension this street — most likely derives from a mid-seventeenth-century brewer with naval ambitions. According to historical information recorded on the wall of the Anchor pub itself, SE1 Direct’s neighbourhood research confirms it was most likely Josiah Childs, who owned the brewhouse around 1665, who gave the enterprise its maritime identity. Childs was closely involved with the navy, supplying masts, spars, bowsprits, stores and small beer to the fleet — and chose the anchor as his emblem accordingly.

The brewery itself had deeper roots still. As documented by British History Online in the Survey of London (Volume 22), the nucleus of the Anchor Brewery was established by James Monger in the early seventeenth century, with the brewhouse first mentioned in the Token Books in 1634 — on a site leased from Sir John Bodley in 1620, within the same estate that held the Globe Playhouse. Anchor Street, then, takes its name not from a ship or a sailor, but from one brewer’s trade with the fleet.

Before the brewery, this ground belonged to the theatre. The site between Deadman’s Place and Globe Alley — now the footprint of Anchor Street and the surrounding block — formed part of the estate owned by Sir Matthew Brend that included the Globe Playhouse itself. It was a few years after the first Globe burned down in 1613 that James Monger, a citizen and cloth-worker of London, started a brewhouse on the adjoining land. British History Online’s Survey of London records that this site was formally leased to Monger in 1620 and first appears in the Token Books in 1634.

The brewery changed hands several times through the eighteenth century. Henry Thrale, MP and brewer, acquired it in 1764 and became a friend and patron of Dr Samuel Johnson, who was a frequent visitor to the Bankside premises. When Thrale died in 1781, his wife Hester oversaw the sale of the brewery to Robert Barclay and John Perkins for £135,000 — a sum then considered remarkable. Under Barclay Perkins, the enterprise expanded to become one of the largest in the world, drawing over fifty thousand visitors in a single year by the mid-Victorian period.

The neighbourhood around Anchor Street bears visible traces of this industrial past. MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology) has been involved in investigations across the Bankside area, and it was archaeological work that confirmed in 1989 that the car park behind Anchor Terrace — the 1834 building named for the brewery — overlies the foundations of the original Globe Theatre itself. Because Anchor Terrace holds Grade II listed status, full excavation has never been possible, meaning the most celebrated archaeological find of this entire block remains largely underground.

The most tangible cultural legacy on this block is Anchor Terrace — the handsome 1834 terrace on Southwark Bridge Road whose address overlaps with the Anchor Street neighbourhood. As recorded by Historic England, the terrace (list entry 1385914) is Grade II listed: eight houses built as a unified composition in yellow stock brick with cast-iron railings and balconies. Originally built to house senior Anchor Brewery employees, it later served as the brewery’s offices before conversion to residential use in the late 1990s. The surprise hidden beneath it — the foundations of the original Globe Theatre, found in 1989 — ensures the block’s cultural significance extends well below street level.

The Anchor pub itself — at 34 Park Street, yards from Anchor Street — is a separate Grade II listed building whose site has hosted a tavern for over 800 years. Built between 1770 and 1775 as the brewery tap room, it is described as Bankside’s oldest surviving tavern and the last riverside inn of Shakespeare’s era still standing. A room within it is dedicated to the Clink Prison, whose Clink Street site lies just to the north. The cultural density of this small area — from the Bishop of Winchester’s brothels in the medieval period, through the Elizabethan theatres, the industrial brewery, and into today’s South Bank arts quarter — is unmatched in any comparable footprint in London.

Henry Thrale, who owned the Anchor Brewery from 1764 until his death in 1781, made this Bankside site a centre of intellectual life. Dr Samuel Johnson — Thrale’s closest friend — was a regular visitor and wrote of the brewery with genuine affection. Johnson famously remarked, on the occasion of the brewery’s sale, that they were not merely selling vats and coppers but “the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice.” His connection to the Anchor site made Thrale Street nearby the obvious tribute when street naming came later.

Among the first residents of Anchor Terrace in 1834 were Charles Spurrell (1783–1866) and his brother James Spurrell (1776–1840), both employed at the brewery under Barclay Perkins. The brewer John Hoy Waterman also lived in the terrace. These were not the famous names of Bankside history but the working managers of an industrial giant — the people for whom the 1834 terrace was specifically built, their homes a daily reminder of the enterprise that dominated the neighbourhood.

The Anchor Brewery ceased production in 1981 after more than three and a half centuries of continuous operation. The industrial buildings were subsequently demolished, erasing the physical bulk of the complex that had defined this part of Southwark since the reign of James I. What remained — Anchor Terrace, the Anchor pub — was protected by listed building status and survived into the twenty-first century.

The 1990s brought a different kind of transformation to the wider Bankside. Tate Modern opened in 2000 in the converted Bankside Power Station a short walk west, pulling enormous cultural and economic momentum into SE1. Anchor Terrace itself was converted to luxury flats in the late 1990s, its brewery-office interiors replaced by residential use. The street name — outlasting the industry it commemorates by decades — now reads more as heritage than trade.

Anchor Street today sits within one of London’s most visited cultural districts. Borough Market is a short walk east, Tate Modern and the Millennium Bridge are close to the west, and Shakespeare’s Globe — the reconstruction, not the original — rises nearby on New Globe Walk. The area draws millions of visitors annually, though the street itself retains a quieter, more local character than the main riverside promenade. Residential, office, and creative uses now occupy the blocks where the brewery once ran its vast operations.

The nearest station is London Bridge, a short walk east, with Southwark (Jubilee line) also within easy reach to the west. The street sits within the Bankside conservation area, and the listing of nearby Anchor Terrace and the Anchor pub ensures that physical links to the brewery era will persist even as the South Bank continues to evolve.