Great Maze Pond

Great Maze Pond is today an internal road within Guy's Hospital’s sprawling campus, a passage between its major buildings. The street takes its character from this medical context—busy with staff and patients, its origins hidden beneath modern brick and steel. Yet the name carries a story from rural London, when this patch of The Borough was open field and grazing land.

2019

Great Maze Pond Plaque London SE1 (1)

Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0

2019

Great Maze Pond Plaque London SE1 (3)

Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0

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Historical image not found

Today

Scene in Great Maze Pond at Guy's Hospital, 1996

Geograph · CC BY-SA 2.0

The street is named after the Manor of Maze, which once stood on this land and included a large pond. The pond itself has long been built over, but the street’s name remains as witness to a landscape that vanished over two centuries ago.

Great Maze Pond takes its name from the Manor of Maze, a medieval landholding that once occupied this area. The manor was in the tenure of Sir William Burcestre, knight, by 1386, and was held in dower by his widow Margaret in 1423 before passing to their son John. The property was never a true manor house with great seat; rather it was a large landholding consisting mostly of fields, pasture, and small houses.

The name's origin has been debated. John Aubrey suggested that Southwark contained a physical hedge maze which was later converted into buildings bearing that name, but Peter Cunningham argued that Maze Pond derived from the Manor of Maze itself. The more reliable historical record supports Cunningham’s interpretation. The local street-names included ‘Maze Pond,’ ‘Little Maze Pond,’ and ‘The Maze Pond,’ which subsequently became Great Maze Pond.

The land that would become Great Maze Pond remained pastoral through the medieval period and into the early modern era. During the 16th and 17th centuries, drovers brought herds of cattle and sheep from Kent and Sussex to London to be sold at Smithfield Market, and the fields in Southwark around Great Maze Pond served as a crucial rest point where animals could rest for several days and graze on pasture before the final drive to market. The fields around the Maze Pond were a focal point where farmers from Kent and Surrey grazed and watered their cattle.

Guy's Hospital was founded in 1721 by philanthropist Thomas Guy, who had made a fortune as a printer of Bibles and increased it through South Sea Bubble speculation. Maze Pond was a road that lay on hospital grounds that had once been gardens belonging to the Abbot of Battle, created in the 1720s as the hospital took shape. As the hospital was built on the site in 1725, John Rocque’s 1746 Map of London still showed the pond in existence, with local street-names including ‘Maze Pond,’ ‘Little Maze Pond,’ and ‘The Maze Pond’.

Today, Great Maze Pond exists almost entirely within Guy's Hospital’s campus. Medical services are concentrated in buildings to the east of Great Maze Pond—Tower Wing, Bermondsey Wing, Southwark Wing, and Borough Wing—while Guy's Campus, which forms part of King's College London, stands to the west. The street functions as an internal circulation route rather than a public thoroughfare, visited mainly by hospital staff, students, and patients.

The name of the street bears witness to the days of droving near Borough High Street, long before cattle were transported by lorry or train. Though the physical landscape has been utterly transformed, the street name preserves an entire era of London’s rural hinterland and its role in feeding the city.

Great Maze Pond remains a working route through one of London’s major teaching hospitals. The actual street is narrow, its character defined by adjacent hospital buildings rather than street-level commerce or residential use. The street is unusual in having no street, road, yard, court, or avenue suffix in its name, extending as far south as Newcomen Street where it has become part of the modern Guy's Hospital campus.

Walking the street today, no trace of the medieval pond or droving fields remains visible. The landscape has been comprehensively rebuilt, yet the name persists as a historical marker. The fields are no more and the pond has long since been filled in, but for anyone curious about Southwark’s pre-industrial past, the street name offers a direct link to a time when this corner of London was open pasture and grazing land.