Newcomen Street

The street is named after a widow, not a lord or a landowner. Mrs Newcomen, widow of Jonathan Newcomen, a mercer, died in 1675 and was buried in St Saviour's. Her will, dated 12 December 1664, left her property in the parish in trust for clothing poor boys and girls, teaching them to read and write, and putting boys out as apprentices.

That charity, alongside one founded earlier by John Marshall, who died in 1631, came to own the ground on which the street was built. The street itself first appears as the yard behind an inn called the Axe, named in the Southwark manor's Court Leet minutes in 1560 and listed again, with fifteen names attached, in a Token Book of about 1575. It was renamed King Street in 1774, and only became Newcomen Street — honouring the charity, not the family name for its own sake — in 1879.

The street began as the yard of an inn. It formed out of the yard of the Axe, later called the Axe and Bottle, an inn recorded from 1560, and lay along the southern edge of St Saviour's parish where it met St George the Martyr's. By the 17th century the Axe Yard ground had passed to the two charitable trusts, Marshall's and Newcomen's, that would shape the street for the next two centuries.

The house at the entrance to Axe and Bottle Yard was renamed the Sun sometime before 1750, and by 1774 the whole street had become King Street. Rebuilding followed through the 18th and 19th centuries: No. 65 was rebuilt around 1759, incorporating a stone royal coat of arms salvaged from the old gateway at the southern end of London Bridge, and Nos. 66–69 were put up around 1830 in yellow stock brick, one of them — No. 69 — described in 1831 as a "newly erected brick built messuage".

The street's surroundings were, for much of this period, a crowded prison quarter. In the 17th and 18th centuries four prisons — the King's Bench, the Marshalsea, the County Gaol and the House of Correction — stood in the small space between Newcomen Street and St George's Church on Borough High Street. Further change came in the 1850s, when small houses between Maze Pond and Newcomen Street were cleared to make way for Hunt's House at Guy's Hospital. The street took its final name, Newcomen Street, in 1879.

The building was known as the King's Arms public house, and a modern stone panel reading "King's Arms, 1890" was later added beside the older crest. The arms are now protected.

Smaller survivals sit alongside the heraldry. No. 67 still carries a Royal Insurance fire mark. The two stone posts at the street's north and south entrances are protected too.

Two people shaped the street without ever being seen on it. John Marshall died in 1631, and the estate he left to charity came to own a long run of the street's ground. In 1853 his trustees built their office on the site of his own house.

The other was Mrs Newcomen, the mercer's widow whose will set up the charity. It is her name on the street sign, put there in 1879, more than two centuries after she died.

Trade had its names as well. George Mansell ran a printing works at Nos. 67 and 68 for many years in the middle of the 19th century.

Little has been added to Newcomen Street since its 19th-century rebuilding. It is still as narrow as it was in the 18th century.

What has changed is use, not shape. The 19th-century warehouse at No. 70 is now offices, and it has kept its cobbled yard.

Newcomen Street still marks a boundary, as it always has. It runs along what was once the irregular southern edge of St Saviour's parish, close to the site of Guy's Hospital and not far from where four prisons once stood crowded together off Borough High Street.

Walk it today and the crest at No. 65, wrongly labelled but genuinely old, is the clearest sign that this small lane has outlasted more than one version of itself — an inn yard, a King Street, and now Newcomen Street, named for a charity that is older than either title.