Bankside

The name derives directly from the land itself. As documented by British History Online in the Survey of London, the road along the river wall here is among the oldest in the entire area, its position relative to the Thames little changed across the centuries — unlike the Strand on the north bank, which has long since been separated from the river by reclaimed land. The name is recorded in 1554 as the Banke syde, meaning “street along the bank of the Thames.” The “banke” itself was reclaimed marshland held by the Bishop of Winchester, lord of the manor of the Clink, and a Duchy of Lancaster archive map preserves the phrase “the way to the banke” in its original form.

The word “banke” comes from Middle English, itself drawn from Old Norse bakki, meaning a ridge or slope — particularly the sloping margin of a river. The name carries no reference to a person, family, or institution: it is purely topographical, describing where you are standing and what you can see from it.

Bankside owed its extraordinary character to a legal accident: it lay within the Liberty of the Clink, under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Winchester, beyond the reach of the City of London’s authorities. The City could ban bear-baiting, close brothels, and suppress playhouses — but its writ stopped at the river. As recorded in the Survey of London, published by British History Online, Bankside was notorious before the Reformation as the site of London’s licensed brothels, the “stews,” which displayed their signs painted directly onto river-facing walls. An attempt to abolish them failed in 1506; they were finally suppressed in 1546 by royal proclamation.

Once the stews closed, theatrical entrepreneurs rushed in. Philip Henslowe — who owned both the Rose Theatre and a nearby brothel — had already shown that Bankside crowds were ready for new entertainments. The Globe, erected in 1598–9 from timber carried across from Shoreditch, became the greatest playhouse England had seen. Many of Shakespeare’s plays, including all four great tragedies, were written for and first performed there. The playwright Ben Jonson also lived on Bankside during his most productive years, as recorded in British History Online’s account of the area.

Bear-baiting ran alongside the theatres, and the two drew overlapping crowds. The Hope Theatre doubled as a bear-baiting ring, and the Globe sat immediately adjacent to the Bear Garden. When the Council of State ordered bear-baiting to cease in 1653, soldiers shot seven bears on the site. At the Restoration, the Bear Garden was reinstated — a telling measure of how deeply embedded the entertainments of Bankside were in London’s cultural life.

Cardinal’s Wharf, at No. 49 Bankside, is among the most photographed addresses in London — a modest late-17th-century house wedged between the turbine hall of the Tate Modern and the Thames. Historic England’s records list it as a Grade II* listed building, one of the rare survivals of the domestic scale that once lined the whole of the waterfront. The ruins of Winchester Palace, a short walk west on Clink Street, preserve the great 14th-century rose window of the bishops’ great hall — a Scheduled Ancient Monument and the most legible remnant of the medieval power that shaped this entire district.

The pull-quote tradition of Bankside is long and loud. John Evelyn watched the Great Fire of 1666 from here, recording in his diary that he took coach with his wife and son to the Bankside in Southwark to behold the disaster. Samuel Pepys also watched from this bank. Today the South Bank stretch from Tate Modern east to Borough High Street draws more visitors than almost any comparable stretch of urban riverside in Europe.

Ben Jonson lived on Bankside during the height of his career, as recorded by British History Online. Philip Henslowe — theatre owner, pawnbroker and brothel-keeper — ran the Rose Theatre from 1587 and kept meticulous accounts that survive as the most important financial record of the Elizabethan stage. The Globe was co-owned by a syndicate that included William Shakespeare himself, who both performed on its stage and wrote plays specifically for it. Richard Burbage, the company’s lead actor, led the operation of carrying the Shoreditch timbers to Bankside in December 1598.

John Taylor, “the water-poet,” commemorated the rebuilding of the Globe in verse after the 1613 fire, and his writings on the Thames watermen — whose trade was devastated by the theatres drawing audiences across the bridge rather than by boat — offer a rare working-class perspective on Bankside’s golden age.

Bankside Power Station closed in 1981, leaving Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s massive brick building derelict on the riverfront for nearly two decades. Its conversion into Tate Modern, which opened in 2000, was among the most celebrated acts of industrial regeneration in British architectural history. The same year saw the Millennium Bridge open directly opposite, creating a pedestrian axis between Tate Modern and St Paul’s Cathedral for the first time. Shakespeare’s Globe — the thatched reconstruction masterminded by American director Sam Wanamaker — had opened nearby in 1997, yards from the original site.

The SE1 Direct community website has documented the continuing pace of change along the riverside, including the Bankside 1/2/3 complex on Southwark Street, which together house around 5,000 office workers, and the ongoing Bankside Yards development to the west. In 2012, Blackfriars station opened a Bankside entrance on the south bank, improving access to what had already become one of the most visited cultural destinations in London.

Bankside forms part of the “Better Bankside” Business Improvement District, and the riverside walk between Blackfriars Bridge and Bermondsey Street remains one of London’s great pedestrian routes. Cardinal’s Wharf, the Tate Modern, the Globe, the Clink Prison Museum and the ruins of Winchester Palace all sit within a few hundred metres of each other. The area is served by Blackfriars, London Bridge and Southwark stations, and by hydrogen-powered bus routes 381 and RV1.

The green spaces nearest to Bankside offer a quieter counterpart to the crowds on the riverside walk, from the riverbank gardens at Potters Fields to the wilder stretch of Burgess Park to the south.