Bricklayers Arms Flyover

The flyover hangs above one of south London’s noisiest junctions, carrying eastbound traffic from New Kent Road onto Old Kent Road without touching the roundabout below. Four roads converge here — Old Kent Road, New Kent Road, Tower Bridge Road and Great Dover Street — and the concrete structure overhead is the most visible object for hundreds of metres in every direction. This is Bermondsey at its most uncompromising: a traffic machine built for volume, not comfort.

2010

Bricklayers Arms' Flyover

Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 2.0

2010

Bricklayers Arms roundabout (1)

Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 2.0

—

Historical image not found

Today

Bricklayers Arms: shared use path — near Bricklayers Arms Flyover

Geograph · CC BY-SA 2.0

Yet the ground beneath the roundabout has been a stopping-place for travellers for far longer than any road engineer imagined. The name above this junction has barely changed in over six centuries. That name comes from a pub — and the pub came from a trade.

The origin of the name Bricklayers Arms Flyover is not recorded in available historical sources.

After the mid-18th-century building of Westminster Bridge and the associated New Kent Road, this was where the many mid- and east-Kent coaches — from Dover, Maidstone and Canterbury — using the Old Kent Road to or from the City of London set down or picked up passengers travelling to or from the West End. The junction was the point where two great road systems met, and the inn was its hub.

Approval of plans for construction of the roundabout and flyover — to replace the junction of Old Kent Road (A2), New Kent Road (A201) and Tower Bridge Road (A100) — was given by the London County Council in December 1962, with an initial budget cost of £3,510,000. Works were scheduled for 1967. Such construction involved demolition of buildings in all three roads as part of a larger regeneration programme.

A flyover of the Bricklayers Arms roundabout was built in the 1970s to cope with the increase in traffic. Initially it consisted of two lanes — one into and one out of London — however, the London-bound lane was later closed after a number of head-on collisions on the flyover, reducing it to an eastbound-only route.

c. 1845

Lewis Cubitt’s railway terminus facade, c. 1845 — the station that shared the inn’s name and put Bermondsey on the national rail map.

Public domain

1937

The Bricklayers Arms Goods Depot from the air in 1937 — a 26-acre rail complex that anchored heavy industry across Bermondsey for over a century.

Historic England Archive · Public domain

1963

The Bricklayers Arms pub at 37 Old Kent Road, photographed in 1963 — demolished shortly after to make way for the road scheme that bears its name.

Peter Prior · pubshistory.com · Public domain

present

The flyover today, carrying eastbound traffic over the Bermondsey gyratory — a structure whose future remains unresolved.

Stephen Craven · CC BY-SA 2.0 · Geograph

Few road features in south London have attracted as much debate about what to do with them. In 2013, Mayor of London Boris Johnson said there were “no plans to convert the Bricklayers Arms flyover into an elevated park such as a New York-style High Line.” That denial was itself proof of how persistently the idea had circulated. Pre-pandemic, other ideas aired by Southwark Council officials included the conversion of the flyover into an open-air swimming pool. The structure refuses to be ignored.

Southwark Council has been seeking local views on the future of the Bricklayers Arms gyratory, including the potential conversion of the flyover into a tree-lined park. The Old Kent Road Area Action Plan, as tracked by SE1 Direct, has repeatedly returned to the junction as a key regeneration site — one where pedestrian access, housing density, and the fate of a 1970s concrete structure all intersect. Demolition of the flyover has previously been considered but ruled out over cost.

The inn that gave the flyover its name was run by a succession of licensed victuallers across its long history. Trade directories record Fassett & Co at the Bricklayers Arms Inn in 1811 and Thomas Crafter at the same address from at least 1822 through to the 1820s. The pub records show a long chain of tenants managing what was evidently a busy and commercially significant coaching stop.

Charles Hutton Gregory, who installed the world’s first interlocked railway signals and points at the Bricklayers Arms branch line, made this junction a landmark moment in railway engineering history. His work — a safety innovation taken for granted on every railway today — happened at the foot of the same Old Kent Road where brickmakers had traded for four centuries.

Transport for London has considered plans for the removal of the Bricklayers Arms flyover, though it has been locked in a legal dispute with Southwark Council over land ownership at the junction. In 2018, Transport for London ruled out the possibility of building a tube station at the Bricklayers Arms as part of the Bakerloo line extension. The junction has been designated by the Mayor of London as an “opportunity area” for major development.

The pedestrian subways that once ran beneath the roundabout were replaced in 2013 by toucan crossings and shared-use cycle and pedestrian routes across the roundabout. As noted by Historic England, the wider Bermondsey area contains numerous heritage assets whose setting is affected by the scale of infrastructure at this junction — a consideration that will shape any future redevelopment scheme.

The flyover remains in daily use, carrying eastbound traffic from New Kent Road above the gyratory and onto the Old Kent Road. The roundabout below is managed as part of the London Inner Ring Road. Pedestrian access has improved since the filling of the subways, but the junction is still dominated by vehicle movement rather than people.

Southwark Council’s current proposals suggest the flyover could be retained and converted into an elevated park — a “Flyover Park” — keeping the embodied carbon of the structure locked in and planting trees and greenery. Whether the Bricklayers Arms Flyover eventually becomes a park, is demolished, or simply continues to carry traffic, it remains the most visible reminder of a junction that has been shaping journeys in Bermondsey since long before the first brick was ever fired in Kent.