Borough High Street

The railway viaduct that slices across the northern end of Borough High Street was built in 1864. It is the newest layer on one of the oldest roads in Britain. Beneath the food stalls of Stoney Street, behind the galleried yard of the George Inn, and down the narrow alleys named for inns that burned or were demolished centuries ago, the mediaeval street plan survives almost intact. What you walk today is, in its bones, a Roman road.

Borough Market now occupies the triangle to the west. Southwark Cathedral anchors the northern end. The George — the sole surviving galleried coaching inn in London — still trades from its courtyard off the east side. The name on every signpost, Borough High Street, only arrived in the 1890s. The road itself is nearly two thousand years older.

c. 1810

The Tabard Inn — Chaucer's starting point for the Canterbury Tales, still standing in Georgian Borough

Philip Norman, c.1810 · Wikimedia Commons

1889

The George Inn in 1889 — the last galleried coaching inn in London, still trading from its courtyard today

Unknown photographer, 1889 · Wikimedia Commons

1912

The Tabard site in 1912 — by now rebuilt as the Talbot, the old inn yard still recognisable

Walter Besant, 1912 · Wikimedia Commons

Today

Looking south along Borough High Street — the medieval street pattern intact beneath the railway viaduct

Geograph · Wikimedia Commons

The name is older than the street sign by several centuries. The area at the southern end of London Bridge was recorded as ‘Southwarke borow’ in 1559, with ‘borough’ meaning a suburb of a city outside its walls. The word ‘burgh’ — the same root — has given us ‘borough’, which is why those who live and work south of London Bridge still say they are ‘in the Borough’. On John Rocque’s map of 1746, the street is labelled simply ‘The Borough’.

The street running from London Bridge southward through Borough towards Newington has always been an important thoroughfare. The name Blakman Street occurs in 1441 for the portion south of St. George’s Church, while John Stow calls the more northerly section Long Southwark. In the Tudor period both were subsumed as ‘Longe Southwark’; by the late Georgian era the northern section from Duke Street Hill was renamed Wellington Street to commemorate the Duke of Wellington. From the 1890s, the London County Council rationalised metropolitan street names and ‘Borough High Street’ became the unified name for the entire route.

The Romans routed two roads — Stane Street and Watling Street — into Southwark, and they met in what is now Borough High Street. Excavations at St. George the Martyr by MOLA found that initial Roman activity from c. AD 50–70 consisted of dumping to raise ground level, followed by clay-and-timber buildings fronting the bridge approach road, with yard surfaces containing hearths, ovens and an animal pen behind them. This was already a working thoroughfare within a generation of the Roman conquest.

Before the building of Westminster Bridge, Borough High Street was the only connection from the south bank of the Thames to London. As a major communications node for traffic between London and Portsmouth, Dover, and south-east England generally, as well as travellers from Europe, Borough High Street had many coaching inns. It is one of the oldest roads in the London area and from the earliest times has been well supplied with inns; many were used in the 18th and 19th centuries as depots for carrier wagons and passenger coaches to and from Kent, Surrey, Sussex, and Hampshire.

On the east side of the street stood the Marshalsea and King’s Bench Prisons, two of the most notorious debtors’ gaols in England. On the west, the demolished Suffolk Place gave way to the criminal enclave known as the Mint — a refuge for debtors and coiners that had an evil reputation during the 18th century as a resort of thieves and was the haunt of the notorious Jack Sheppard and his companion Jonathan Wild.

The Tabard was probably one of the earliest inns on this street of inns, with a mention as far back as 1306 when the Abbot of Hyde had lodgings adjoining. It is certainly the most famous of the Borough inns as the meeting place of Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims. Henry Bailley, M.P. for Southwark in 1376 and 1379, was then host of the Tabard and was immortalised as the innkeeper who proposed the storytelling contest. The Tabard was rebuilt in the 17th century, known thereafter as the Talbot, and demolished in 1875. Its site is preserved in the name Talbot Yard.

Charles Dickens knew the street intimately. His father, John Dickens, was imprisoned in the Marshalsea from February 1824. Dickens used the White Hart Inn on Borough High Street as the setting for his first meeting of Sam Weller and Mr. Pickwick in The Pickwick Papers, and the Marshalsea — and the street that surrounded it — became the backdrop for Little Dorrit. As SE1 Direct notes, the street’s literary associations make it one of the most richly documented stretches of road in England.

Geoffrey Chaucer set the departure of his Canterbury pilgrims from the Tabard Inn in the 1380s, making Borough High Street the most famous road in English literature. Henry Bailley, M.P. for Southwark in 1376 and 1379, was the actual host of the Tabard at that time. He is the model for the Host in the Canterbury Tales — a verifiable historical figure immortalised by his most famous guest.

The Harvard family connection is recorded in British History Online’s Survey of London. The Queen’s Head Inn on Borough High Street was owned by the family of Robert Harvard, whose son John Harvard emigrated to Massachusetts and left his estate to the college that bears his name. John Harvard was baptised at St. Saviour’s and is commemorated at Southwark Cathedral to this day.

Many of the houses built after the 1689 fire were still standing in the early years of the 20th century, but few remnants survived the destruction of the 1939–45 war, which in this area was particularly heavy. The Blitz erased much of the historic fabric south of the railway viaduct. Post-war rebuilding replaced Georgian and Victorian frontages with office blocks, though several seventeenth-century buildings — including parts of Calvert’s Buildings — survived.

Borough Market’s transformation from a wholesale fruit-and-vegetable trade into one of London’s premier food destinations began in earnest in the late 1990s. The market had been moved from the street itself — where it was abolished by Act of Parliament in the mid-18th century — to the triangle to the west, accessed from Stoney Street. Its revival drew restaurants, bars, and food retailers back to Borough High Street, reversing decades of post-war decline.

The yards and alleys that once held coaching inns are the best guide to what Borough High Street used to be. White Hart Yard, King’s Head Yard, Talbot Yard, and Queen’s Head Yard still open off the east side, their long shapes preserving the ground plans of mediaeval inn courtyards. Counter Court, the small alley at the northern fork, preserves the name of the old Borough Compter — the debtors’ prison demolished in 1855.

David Bomberg House at 282–302 Borough High Street is a hall of residence for London South Bank University students, named after the painter David Bomberg who taught at the Borough Polytechnic in the 1940s and 1950s. For green space, the nearest escapes are Mint Street Park to the west and the riverside gardens along the Thames Path to the north.