Emerson Street

Emerson Street is a short residential street in The Borough neighbourhood of Southwark, lying between Park Street and Sumner Street on the south bank of the Thames. The street runs just south of what was once the riverside warren of Bankside, an area once famous for its theatres, bear-baiting pits, and watermen’s stairs leading down to the river. Today the northern part of the street has been renamed New Globe Walk, a transformation that speaks to how completely this once-industrial corner has become a destination for culture and tourism.

2014

Emerson Street

Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 2.0

2025

London - Southwark - Bankside - Park Street x Emerson Street - 2025-11-21

Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0

—

Historical image not found

Today

View down Emerson Street from Park Street

Geograph · CC BY-SA 2.0

The street itself is modest in scale—less than 86 metres long according to modern measurements—but its name carries a story that connects the pavements of today back to the property owners and benefactors of the Tudor and Stuart eras. To understand why it is called Emerson Street, you must look not to Victorian developers or nineteenth-century speculators, but to a family of merchants and charitable founders who shaped this precinct four centuries ago.

During the reign of Elizabeth, part of Axe Yard was the property of the Emerson family. William Emerson, senior, died in 1575. His monument in Southwark Cathedral has the succinct epitaph, “he lived and died an honest man.” His son, Thomas (d. 1595), founded one of the parish charities and gave his name to Emerson Street. Thomas Emerson’s role as a parish benefactor—establishing a charity to clothe poor children and fund their apprenticeships—meant his name became synonymous with the area around the family property. When the street name stabilised in the nineteenth century, it took Emerson as its permanent designation.

Emerson Street is the name on the 1895 Ordnance Survey map, however earlier than this, there seems to be a dual use of Emerson and Thames Street back to around 1880, with Thames Street being the name used prior to 1880. The transition from Thames Street (a more generic riverside reference) to Emerson Street thus occurred in the final decades of the nineteenth century, transforming the street’s identity from a simple topographical description to a memorial of its Elizabethan proprietors.

The land on which Emerson Street stands was formerly part of Axe Yard, a precinct that developed from the yard surrounding the Axe Inn—one of Southwark’s many coaching inns. During the Elizabethan period, William Emerson had acquired property here, building houses and establishing himself as a significant landowner in this dense and bustling riverside district. The exact boundaries of the original Emerson holdings are difficult to fix, but records confirm that his son Thomas inherited substantial property in the area and devoted his resources to founding a parish charity.

By the early modern period, Southwark had become densely built and the original distinction of individual properties had blurred. Yet as streets received formal names in the nineteenth century, the Emerson name endured—a testament to how deeply the family’s charitable reputation had impressed itself upon local memory. When the northern section of Emerson Street was renamed New Globe Walk in the mid-1990s, it reflected not a forgetting of the old name but a rebranding of the area in line with the opening and reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre.

Emerson Street lies at the heart of one of London’s most historically significant and now culturally vibrant districts. The Bankside of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a libertine precinct outside the jurisdiction of the City’s puritanical authorities. Bear-baiting rings, brothels, and theatres—including the Rose and the Globe—packed the area. The Thames itself bustled with wherries and barges, and the stairs dotting its banks provided access to the river for the watermen, fishmongers, and ordinary Londoners who depended on it.

Today, the renamed northern section—New Globe Walk—has become a pedestrian thoroughfare oriented entirely towards the cultural institutions that have since been implanted here: Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, the Tate Modern, the Millennium Bridge, and the South Bank complex. This transformation from a working-class riverside street to a curated cultural precinct has erased much of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century character. Yet the street’s name, or what remains of it, still carries echoes of the Elizabethan merchants and benefactors whose property and charity shaped the social landscape of medieval Southwark.

Emerson Street (and New Globe Walk) is now a fully integrated part of the Bankside cultural and residential precinct. The nearest Tube station is London Bridge, approximately 600 yards away. The street connects to Park Street, Sumner Street, and New Globe Walk. Office development and conversion of former industrial buildings have dominated the area in recent decades, transforming what was once a congested manufacturing and warehousing quarter into an aspirational residential and leisure destination.

Walking this street today reveals little physical evidence of the Elizabethan merchants and seventeenth-century theatregoers who once passed through. The character is contemporary—modern brick and glass, café culture, tourists on their way to the Globe. Yet the name, where it persists on street signs and maps, anchors memory to the Emerson family and their charitable works, a reminder that urban transformation, however complete, rests always upon older layers of property ownership, social obligation, and the ambitions of those who came before.