Union Street

2013

Union Street today

Geograph · Stephen McKay · CC BY-SA 2.0

2013

Cross Bones Graveyard gates, Redcross Way

Flickr / Wikimedia Commons · Duncan Harris · CC BY 2.0

Union Street today is a working thoroughfare in Southwark, stretching from Borough High Street south-west to Blackfriars Road. Walk it and you walk a street that did not exist as a single named entity until 1813 — which means you also walk through two centuries of piecemeal making: an act of Parliament, a carriage way sliced through a pub, institutional buildings, craftsmen's workshops, and a burial ground that holds some of Bankside's hardest-used history. The street you see now is a palimpsest of purposes, each layer a different century at work.

Union Street did not grow all at once. The eastern portion was authorized in 1774 by Act of Parliament as a carriage way from the High Street, routed through the Greyhound Inn into Queen Street. That eastern stretch opened in 1781. The whole affair — the earlier Queen Street and Duke Street — was then consolidated and renamed Union Street in 1813, per the Survey of London, which records the renaming itself but gives no reason for the choice of name. Two independent secondary sources — Wikipedia and Layers of London — agree on why: the street was named Union Street because it marked the boundary between two local parishes. Neither is the Survey of London itself, so this remains probable rather than verified, but the corroboration across two separate compilers strengthens it considerably. In 1908, Charlotte Street was incorporated into Union Street, extending the street further and bringing it closer to its present form.

The ground beneath Union Street carried Roman-era occupation long before any of its recorded history. Archaeological excavations at 10–18 Union Street, reported by Kieron Heard in the journal London Archaeologist and hosted by Layers of London, found the site sat on the western edge of a sand-and-gravel island that rose above the surrounding Thames-side marshes at the time of the Roman invasion in AD 43, roughly 30 metres west of the Roman road linking Watling Street and Stane Street to London Bridge — dry, buildable ground in an otherwise waterlogged landscape, centuries before Southwark had streets at all.

The site that became Union Street carried institutional weight long before the street's name was minted. In the area stood Cross Bones Burying Ground, located at the northeast corner near Red Cross Way. Per the Survey of London, the ground remained unconsecrated, though it was used as a parish burial ground from the middle of the seventeenth century until 1853; tradition holds that it was the burial place for the 'single women' of Bankside's stews — those whose lives and deaths fell outside respectable parish charity. The Bishop of Winchester held the lease. The burial ground measured approximately 133 feet north-south and 153 feet east-west.

A workhouse was constructed on the land at the present site of Southwark Bridge Road Fire Station in 1779–80, predating the street's own formal existence. In 1782, Union Hall was erected on the south side, built to serve as a meeting place for Surrey county justices. Both institutions anchored what would become Union Street as a place of civic and poor-law administration.

Georgian Building and Early Trade

By 1789, the surveyor George Gwilt the elder had constructed several houses on the north side of the street, east of the burial ground. Gwilt was surveyor to the Surrey and Kent Commissioners of Sewers, district surveyor of St. George's Parish, and surveyor to the Clink Paving Commissioners — a man of local standing. He occupied No. 18 (formerly No. 8) with his son and established a museum of local antiquities at the house, which included drawings of Roman pottery, a pursuit reflecting the antiquarian curiosity of his time. That house was demolished at the nineteenth century's end.

In 1791, the vestry allocated the southwest corner of the burial ground to the Boys' Charity School, which had been relocated from a Dark Alley near Montague Close. The school supported seventy boys through Collett's Gift charity and voluntary subscriptions, plus twenty more through the Newcomen Charity. The site is now occupied by St. Saviour's Parochial Schools.

Trade and Continuity

By the mid-nineteenth century, Union Street had become a centre of the hat trade and furriers, per the Survey of London. Samuel Cashshaw, hat manufacturer, occupied No. 100 from 1817 to 1844. Lincoln and Bennett, hat manufacturers, held No. 104 from 1850 to 1861. Steele and Foster, hatters and furriers, occupied No. 102 from 1864 to 1873, anchoring the street's reputation for the trade.

Two addresses show remarkable continuity. Nos. 59 and 61, with early nineteenth-century brick facades, originated from the Southwark Park Estate and were ground-leased by the Bishop of Winchester in 1820 to Arthur Pott and others, who in turn leased them to John Allsop in 1821. The Survey of London also states the firm of Allsop, turners and brushmakers, was in occupation of the premises from 1787 until 1880 — a date that predates the 1820–21 leases by over three decades, a gap the source itself does not explain. In 1882, Joseph Watson & Co., yeast manufacturers, took over the premises and held them into the twentieth century.

Union Street's character derives from its layered past. It carries the weight of the unconsecrated burial ground, where the dead of Bankside's hardest lives were committed; the institutional anchor of Union Hall and the workhouse; the Georgian ambition of a surveyor and antiquarian; and the long commercial life of hatmakers and other trades. Each generation has left its mark — some visible in surviving facades, some visible only in record and memory.

The street's literary edge runs through neighbouring Orange Street, later renamed Copperfield Street — a name that nods to Charles Dickens, whose own childhood poverty in this part of Southwark is understood to have shaped the early chapters of David Copperfield, per Layers of London. An Independent meeting house stood on Orange Street from 1640 until 1788, when it relocated to a new building on Union Street itself — one more thread tying the street's civic and institutional life together across three centuries.

Union Street remains a working commercial and residential street in Southwark, carrying traffic from Borough High Street to Blackfriars Road. Its character today reflects its Georgian and Victorian inheritance — solid brick facades, many dating to the early nineteenth century, house offices and small businesses. Some premises have held their occupants or successor trades for generations. The street remembers little visibly of Cross Bones or the workhouse, yet those absences are part of its identity: a place where the poorest and most marginalised of Bankside once had their only dignity.