Mint Street

Mint Street today is defined by Mint Street Park, the largest green space in Bankside. The park occupies the site of the former Evelina Children's Hospital (1869–1976), which once treated childhood diseases in a crowded working-class neighbourhood. Where there was once a hospital, now there is a playground, a community stage, and plantings tended by volunteers. The street itself is short and narrow, cutting through Southwark between the railway arches and Southwark Bridge Road, its Victorian terraces marking the boundary between heritage and modernity.

2010

Mint Street Park, Southwark

Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 2.0

2010

Douglas Buildings, Mint Street, Southwark

Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 2.0

2016

Mint Street, Borough

Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 2.0

Today

Southwark : vehicular access, Douglas Buildings

Geograph · CC BY-SA 2.0

But Mint Street was not always a place of healing. For over a century it was synonymous with human misery—a slum Liberty run by debtors’ privilege, home to a notorious workhouse, and a street Charles Dickens walked as a boy. The name, though, reaches back even further into Tudor history.

Mint Street, opposite St. George's Church, keeps in remembrance a mint for the coinage of money, which was established here by Henry VIII. In the 1540s, Henry VIII set up mint Brandon House at a time when three additional mints were established to supplement that in the Tower. It was set up to produce silver coinage, and closed in 1551. The mint occupied Brandon House, a grand mansion that had belonged to Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, Henry’s brother-in-law. A mint was established here for the king's use.

The area retained the name of the Mint despite its short existence. It was handed, under Mary I, to the diocese of York and they leased it for development of the worst sort and slums resulted. The Mint Street area had been known as ’The Mint’. It was a slum area with privileges for debtors until The Mint in Southwark Act 1722 removed these rights. The name persisted long after the royal house stopped striking coins—a street called after a building that lasted only 16 years, but whose identity outlived its purpose by centuries.

Mint Street dates from before 1679 in which year Thomas Lant married the daughter of Sir Edward Bromfield, and thus acquired an interest in a house called Suffolk Place. By then, Mint Street is shown on Morden and Lea's map of 1682 and was closely developed. The street took shape in the late 17th century as a distinct thoroughfare, but its character was shaped entirely by its past. As a Liberty—a privileged area exempt from London’s jurisdiction—it attracted debtors fleeing their creditors. By the 18th century, it had become a haunt of poverty and crime.

The workhouse in Mint Street dates back to 1729. The initial number of residents was relatively small, and conditions were recorded in ’An Account of Several Workhouses’ in October 1731. But by the 19th century, conditions had become abysmal. The house appears to have suffered from various epidemics, and especially from typhus. The tramp ward for the women is a miserable room, foul and dirty, with imperfect light and ventilation, the floor being simply bedded with straw. The Mint is awfully memorable in modern annals; for amid the squalor of its narrow streets appeared, in 1832, the first case of Asiatic cholera in the metropolis.

Mint Street Park is located at the previous site of the Evelina Children's Hospital from 1869 to 1976. The hospital brought medical purpose to a street that had long known only want. Bankside Open Spaces Trust worked to transform the park. Large planting beds were added, including a rockery and loggery, to create a beautiful space for both local people and local wildlife to enjoy. Today, once a year the volunteer-run Mint Street Festival takes place celebrating music and culture created by the inspiring local community.

Mint Street itself is quiet and residential, but its identity is now bound to Mint Street Park. The street functions as an anchor for Bankside culture, hosting the annual Mint Street Festival, which celebrates local music and creativity. The park provides relief from the bustle of Borough and Tooley Street, with volunteer-maintained gardens and a playground that serves families from the densely packed surrounding estates.

The street’s character is rooted in transformation. Where the workhouse once stood, children now play. The Victorian terraces that line Mint Street itself remain modest, unmarked by the history beneath them. Yet every step on this pavement crosses centuries—from Tudor ambition to Dickensian misery to modern community resilience.

Mint Street itself is one of Southwark’s quieter passages, blocked to through traffic and lined with modest Victorian and Edwardian housing. It runs from Southwark Bridge Road southwards, terminating where the railway viaduct and Marshalsea Road now cut the ancient street short. The street sign above the entrance bears the name of a Tudor coining house, but there is nothing mint-green about the character—just solid red brick, drawn windows, and the hum of a working neighbourhood.

Visitors coming to Mint Street today come for the park, the Mint Street Festival in summer, or because they live in one of the housing estates that crowd this corner of Southwark. They will not see the mint, nor the workhouse, nor the slum Liberty that gave the street its complicated character. But standing on the street, one stands on layers—on the site of royal ambition, of suffering, and finally, of community healing.