Kentish Buildings

Kentish Buildings is a narrow court opening into Borough High Street between Nos. 121 and 123. On its northern side it still retains the red brick fronts of several 18th century houses, of three storeys, with steep tiled roofs, eaves, plain brick strings, and flush framed sash windows to the two upper floors. The narrow entry to the yard is spanned by a four-storey 18th century building with wide sash windows at the back.

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Today

Archaeology on the site of Kentish Buildings (1)

Geograph · CC BY-SA 2.0

This small alley encodes a forgotten bit of London's transport history. The name itself tells the story of coaching routes and Kent traders converging on Borough High Street. But what drew commerce here in the first place was older still—the pilgrimage roads.

Until the beginning of the 19th century Kentish Buildings was known as Christopher Alley. It occupies the site of the inn yard of the Christopher, an inn marked on the plan of 1542, and probably so named after the patron saint of travellers, Saint Christopher. The current name Kentish Buildings is after 17th century property owner Thomas Kentish. There is a yard entrance on the south which is known as Kentish Buildings, indicating a connection with the County of Kent from where stagecoaches and waggons often came on routes ending at inns along Borough High Street.

The transformation of the street’s name captures the shift from religious pilgrimage to commercial transport. When pilgrims traveled to Canterbury, they gathered at the Christopher. As coach routes became established and Kent traders brought their goods to market at Borough High Street, the yard became known not for a saint but for a proprietor—Thomas Kentish—and by association with the traffic rolling in from his county.

The Christopher Inn stood at a pivotal junction in Southwark’s medieval geography. Pilgrims, as documented in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, travelled along the road from London and Southwark on their way to Canterbury. The inn was one of many coaching establishments that made Borough High Street the principal embarkation point for anyone traveling southeastward from the City.

By 1840, the Kentish Drovers public house was named because the road was a thoroughfare for market traffic. The roads that had once carried pilgrims now moved livestock, produce, and trade goods. Kentish Buildings—once just an inn yard—had become an architectural witness to that transformation. The ground floor has been reconstructed to form part of the Grapes public-house in Borough High Street.

According to British History Online, the site preserves evidence of occupation spanning centuries. The two houses here have been occupied together for the last two centuries, and were tenanted by S. Garth Wicking & Co. as a music warehouse. That conversion reflects the 20th-century shift away from residential occupation toward light industrial and storage use—a pattern repeated across South London.

Kentish Buildings remains understated and easy to overlook. To walk through the narrow arched entry is to step out of the bustle of Borough High Street into a preserved fragment of Southwark’s 18th-century fabric. The cobbles, the brick, the proportions of the court all speak to an earlier mode of urban living—one where an inn yard, a staircase, and a fireplace were the focus of daily life.

The street stands adjacent to Borough Market and the cathedral, embedded in one of London’s most historically layered neighborhoods. Visitors to the market often pass Kentish Buildings without noticing it. Yet the court encodes the routes that made Borough High Street what it was—the convergence of pilgrimage, commerce, and the everyday traffic of goods and travelers that kept medieval and early modern London supplied.