Grange Road

Grange Road runs east across Bermondsey from Tower Bridge Road toward Southwark Park Road, cutting through a landscape of converted warehouses, interwar council estates, and new-build residential blocks that replaced Victorian industry. The Alaska Building — its name picked out in stone above the entrance gate — announces the road’s industrial past the moment you turn onto it. What looks like a handsome Art Deco block was once one of London’s largest fur-processing plants.

2012

44 Grange Road, Bermondsey (2012)

Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 2.0

2018

Grange Road

Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 2.0

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Historical image not found

Today

The Grange, Bermondsey — near Grange Road

Geograph · CC BY-SA 2.0

The street today mixes long-term Bermondsey residents with newer arrivals drawn by warehouse conversions and proximity to the river. As reported by SE1 Direct, development pressure along Grange Road has been intense since the early 2000s, with old factory footprints giving way to high-density private housing. The name “Grange” still marks everything nearby — the surrounding neighbourhood, a parallel road, a pub — and the reason for all of it goes back nine hundred years.

The name goes back to a working farm — a grange — maintained by the Cluniac monks of Bermondsey Abbey. As documented by British History Online, the road was built on the pasture-ground belonging to the monastery, extended to what was still called Grange Farm well into the 18th century, and continued onward to the ancient watercourse of the Neckinger. The Old French word grange, meaning granary or barn, entered Middle English from the ecclesiastical estates that scattered such farms across the landscape of medieval England.

The road was not always called Grange Road. British History Online records that the same thoroughfare was known as Blue Anchor Road by the mid-18th century — a name still in official use as late as 1871. The present name re-asserted the monastic memory long after the abbey itself had been demolished. The whole area to the south and east of Bermondsey Street takes its name from the same source: the grange of Bermondsey Abbey dominated the land here for 500 years.

Bermondsey Abbey was a Cluniac foundation established in the late 11th century, and its grange occupied the farmland to the south-east. The monks farmed this ground for centuries; the Bermondsey Priory gained independence from its French mother house in 1381, when Robert Downton became the first English prior, and was elevated to an abbey in 1399. After the Dissolution, the land was sold on and the farm persisted — an 1812 illustration shows a substantial farmhouse still standing here, owned in the late 18th century by the Rolls family.

After the Great Fire of 1666, Bermondsey briefly attracted wealthier residents and took on a garden-suburb character along the line of Grange Road. That gentility did not last. The tanning and leather trades that had always occupied the surrounding lanes — fed by the tidal ditches and streams crossing the ground — spread and intensified. By the early 19th century, the road was flanked by tan-yards on virtually every approach. William Curtis, the pioneering apothecary and botanist, lived near Grange Road around 1770 and collected and described indigenous plants from the surrounding area — a reminder of how recently this had been open land.

The Victorian period brought rapid population growth. As recorded by British History Online, Bermondsey’s population rose from 29,741 in 1831 to 81,323 by 1901 — an almost threefold increase driven by factory employment and tenement-house building. Grange Road held a Georgian streetscape at its core, but the early Victorian decades filled every gap with small terraces. By 1900, this was an entirely working-class street of grocers, corn dealers, tanners, fur merchants, pawnbrokers, and coffee rooms.

The Alaska Building is the road’s most striking survival. The fur factory at No. 61 was built around 1869 to treat Alaskan seal fur — hence the stone seal still carved above the main gate. The main block was rebuilt in 1932 by Wallis, Gilbert & Partners, the architects who gave Britain the Firestone and Hoover buildings. During the Second World War, Martin’s workers here prepared 450,000 sheepskins for RAF flying suits and greatcoats. Converted to loft apartments in the 1990s, the Alaska Building was among the earliest warehouse conversions in SE1 and anticipated the borough-wide regeneration that followed.

In more recent years, a corner of the road held a Banksy mural — the “Haring Dog” — on a wall that was later demolished for a new residential development. The loss of that wall prompted a planning dispute that, as reported by SE1 Direct, became a flashpoint for debates over affordable housing and heritage in Bermondsey’s rapidly changing built environment.

William Curtis lived near Grange Road around 1770 while creating one of London’s first botanic gardens in Bermondsey. The apothecary and entomologist collected and classified indigenous plants from the surviving open land around the road, publishing his findings in the six-volume Flora Londinensis. In 1787 he founded the Botanical Magazine, which continues publication today as Curtis’s Botanical Magazine. A street named after him — Curtis Street — lies nearby, a permanent acknowledgement of his connection to this ground.

Trade directories from the early 20th century record a remarkably varied community on Grange Road: corn dealers, glue manufacturers, gramophone dealers, and at least three physicians or surgeons operating simultaneously from single addresses. One entry stands out — Miss Selina Fitzherbert MD, BS, listed as a physician and surgeon at No. 44 — a woman practising medicine on a working-class South London street in an era when female doctors were rare and often unwelcome in established practices.

The 1990s conversion of the Alaska Building into loft apartments marked the opening of a transformation that accelerated sharply after 2000. Former factory and warehouse sites along Grange Road were cleared and rebuilt as private residential developments. A 2020 account described the area as experiencing a “real estate makeover,” with new-build flats on Grange Road reaching prices from £895,000 — a stark contrast to the working-class community that had occupied the same ground for more than a century. Long-term residents and community groups have noted the compression of Bermondsey’s industrial memory as factory gates and chimneys are demolished or repackaged as heritage branding.

Planning disputes on the road have become emblematic of Southwark’s wider tensions. A 2015 approval for a seven-storey block at the corner of Grange Road and The Grange included seven social-rented homes — a commitment later dropped entirely in a revised application. The corner had previously carried a Banksy “Haring Dog” mural on its wall, the loss of which added cultural weight to an already charged debate about what Bermondsey is becoming.

Grange Road today is a palimpsest of Bermondsey’s layers — the Alaska Building’s stone seal surveys new glass-fronted apartment blocks, while the church of St Luke on the road’s north side, recorded by British History Online as a continuous chancel-and-nave building with bell-cote, provides institutional continuity against the churn of development. Bermondsey Spa Gardens sits opposite the Alaska Building at the junction with Spa Road, offering a pocket of open green where the chalybeate spring was discovered in the 1770s. The name “Grange” still radiates outward from this road — Grange Walk, The Grange, Grange Yard — all testimony to nine centuries of monastic memory embedded in the street map.