Southwark is the old borough on the south bank of the Thames at the foot of London Bridge, and Bankside is its riverside strip between Blackfriars Bridge and Southwark Bridge. For 500 years this was where Londoners came to do what the City would not allow inside its walls: theatres, bear pits, prisons, brothels and inns. Almost none of it survives above ground, which is why most visitors walk straight past it.
The big attractions here are covered elsewhere on this site. Our guides to Tate Modern, Shakespeare's Globe and Borough Market have the opening times and prices, and our pages on the South Bank and Borough and Bermondsey cover the riverside walk and the streets behind it.
This page is about the layer underneath: the medieval liberty, the coaching inns, the paupers' burial ground and the theatre foundations, and how to find them in an afternoon. It is a good walk for a second or third visit to London, and it costs almost nothing.
The Bankside history walk
- Start
- Borough High Street, at the George Inn
- Finish
- Blackfriars Bridge, or Tate Modern
- Distance
- About 2 km, or an hour and a half with stops
- Cost
- Free apart from the Clink Prison Museum and the Golden Hinde
- Stations
- London Bridge, Borough, Southwark, Blackfriars
- The George Inn
- The George Inn Yard, SE1 1NH; free to enter; owned by the National Trust
- Best time
- A weekday morning, before the market crowds
Why Southwark existed at all
For most of its history London had one bridge, and Southwark was the settlement at the far end of it. Travellers coming from Canterbury and Dover arrived here, and if the city gates were shut for the night they stayed here. That produced a long street of coaching inns along Borough High Street and a population of carters, boatmen and innkeepers.
It also sat mostly outside the City of London's authority. A large part of Bankside was the Liberty of the Clink, land belonging to the Bishop of Winchester, where the City's rules on trade and public order did not apply. The result was the entertainment district of Tudor and Stuart London: playhouses, bear-baiting and bull-baiting rings, taverns and licensed brothels, the last of them regulated by the bishop himself. The prostitutes who worked there were known as Winchester Geese.
Knowing that explains the whole walk. Everything odd about this half-kilometre of riverbank exists because it was legally somewhere else.
Photo: Paul the Archivist · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons · resized
The George Inn: the last galleried inn in London
Borough High Street once had a dozen coaching inns, each built around a yard with open galleries running along the upper floors. Fire, railways and redevelopment took them all but one. The George Inn, in a yard off the east side of the street, is the last galleried inn left in London, and the National Trust owns it.
The present building dates from 1677, rebuilt after a fire, and only one range of the original three survives: the rest was demolished in the 1870s to build a railway goods yard. What remains is a long timber-fronted building with two tiers of open gallery, looking into a cobbled yard.
It is a working pub, leased to an operator, and it is free to walk into the yard and look. It serves food and beer at ordinary London pub prices. It can be very full on a summer evening, when the yard fills with office workers, and almost empty at 11am on a Tuesday, when you can stand in the yard and see it properly. The National Trust lists opening details on its page for the George Inn.
Walk a little further along the High Street and you pass the entrances to the other inn yards, their names still on the wall: White Hart Yard, Talbot Yard, King's Head Yard. The buildings have gone, but the medieval plot boundaries have not. Our guide to historic pubs in London covers the George alongside the older survivors in the City.
Go into the George Inn yard before noon. It is the only place in London where you can stand in a 17th-century inn yard and look up at the galleries, and from about 5pm on a weekday the yard is packed shoulder to shoulder. The building is best understood empty.
The Marshalsea wall and Crossbones
Behind the shops on Borough High Street, in a narrow passage called Angel Place, stands a long brick wall. It is the surviving wall of the Marshalsea, the debtors' prison where Charles Dickens's father was held in 1824 when Dickens was 12, an experience that runs through Little Dorrit. Plaques along the wall carry quotations from the novel. The rest of the prison is now a public library and a small garden.
Five minutes west, on Redcross Way, a set of iron gates is covered in ribbons, beads, photographs and handwritten notes. This is Crossbones Graveyard, an unconsecrated burial ground used from medieval times for the poor and for the Bankside prostitutes, and closed in 1853 as overfull. Archaeologists excavating for the Jubilee line in the 1990s found densely packed burials, many of them children.
There is now a small memorial garden on the site, opened by volunteers, with limited opening hours that change through the year; the gates and the shrine can be seen at any time from the street. It is the most affecting stop on this walk and takes five minutes.
Winchester Palace, the Clink and the Rose
On Clink Street, between the market and the river, a fragment of wall rises three storeys with a great rose window cut into the gable. This is what is left of Winchester Palace, the bishops' London residence, burnt in 1814 and revealed again by a fire in a warehouse in the 1980s. It stands in the open, free to look at, and is easy to walk past.
Next to it, the Clink Prison Museum occupies a cellar on the site of the bishop's prison, from which the English slang "in the clink" comes. It is a small, dark, paid attraction aimed at families, heavy on instruments of torture; check the price and hours on its own website before committing.
On Park Street, under a modern office block, are the remains of the Rose, the first playhouse built on Bankside, in 1587, where Marlowe and the young Shakespeare were staged. The foundations were found in 1989 and are preserved under water and sand to stop them decaying. The site opens for performances and occasional tours rather than continuously. A plaque nearby marks the site of the original Globe, about 200 metres from the modern reconstruction.
At St Mary Overie Dock, a full-size replica of Drake's Golden Hinde sits in a berth off the river. It is a ticketed attraction, and it is smaller than photographs suggest, which is precisely the point: this is the size of ship that sailed round the world in 1577.
Southwark Cathedral and the streets behind the market
Southwark Cathedral, beside the south end of London Bridge, has been a church since at least the 12th century and became a cathedral only in 1905. Entry is free. Inside are a monument to Shakespeare with a stained-glass window above it showing characters from the plays, the tomb of the poet John Gower, and a memorial to John Harvard, who was baptised here in 1607 and whose bequest founded the American university. Check the day's opening times on the cathedral's website, as services take priority.
Behind it, in the garret of the old St Thomas's Church, is the Old Operating Theatre Museum, a pre-anaesthetic surgical theatre of 1822 reached by a narrow spiral staircase. It is one of the strangest small museums in Europe, and it is on this walk rather than on the main riverside route.
Bankside: two power stations by the same architect
Tate Modern was Bankside Power Station, designed by Giles Gilbert Scott and built in two stages from 1947. Scott also designed the power station at Battersea, four kilometres upriver, and the red telephone box. Bankside stopped generating in 1981 and opened as a gallery in 2000.
The Turbine Hall is free to enter and so are the permanent collection displays, and the viewing level of the Blavatnik Building gives a free view across the river to St Paul's. It belongs on any list of free things to do in London.
Beside the gallery, a short terrace of 17th and 18th-century houses survives on Cardinal Cap Alley, squeezed between the Globe and the water. The narrow alley beside them is one of the last unaltered bits of the old Bankside frontage. At low tide, the foreshore below is one of the places licensed mudlarks search; our guide to mudlarking on the Thames explains the permit rules before you go down any river stairs.
Getting there and walking the route
| Station | Lines | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| London Bridge | Jubilee, Northern, National Rail | The cathedral, the market, the start of the walk |
| Borough | Northern line | The George Inn and the Marshalsea wall |
| Southwark | Jubilee line | Tate Modern and the western end |
| Blackfriars | District, Circle, Thameslink | Arriving from north of the river; the platforms span the Thames |
| Bankside Pier | Uber Boat by Thames Clippers | Arriving by water at Tate Modern |
Blackfriars is worth a mention of its own: the platforms sit on the bridge itself, so the station has entrances on both banks and you can walk across the river inside it. The roof is covered in solar panels.
The whole walk is flat, paved and about two kilometres, and it links naturally to the riverside path in both directions. Our page on walking in London covers the longer Thames routes, including the stretch east towards Wapping and Rotherhithe. Several operators run evening walks over the same ground; see our guide to ghost tours in London for what those are like.
Borough Market is shut on the days this walk is best. The full market does not run every day of the week, and the streets around it are hardest to move through on Friday and Saturday. If your interest is the history rather than the food, come on a Monday or Tuesday morning and you will have Clink Street almost to yourself.
Staying here
There are hotels along the river and around London Bridge, and this is one of the best-connected places in London: the Jubilee line, the Northern line and the Thameslink route all pass through, and the Shard sits directly on top of the station. Rooms cost less than the equivalent north of the river, and you are within walking distance of St Paul's and the Tower. Our page on staying on the South Bank compares the options, and our guide to the bridges of London works well as a way of planning the walk back.
Frequently asked questions
Can you go inside the George Inn?
Yes. It is a working pub owned by the National Trust and leased to an operator, and both the yard and the bars are free to enter during opening hours. Go in the morning if you want to see the galleries without a crowd in front of them.
What is left of the original Globe theatre?
Only a marked outline on Park Street, about 200 metres from the modern reconstruction. The foundations of the Rose, an earlier Bankside playhouse of 1587, survive nearby under an office building and are preserved under water and sand.
Is Southwark Cathedral free to visit?
Yes, entry is free, though donations are welcome and services take priority over sightseeing. Inside you will find the Shakespeare memorial and window, the tomb of John Gower and a memorial to John Harvard. Check the day's hours on the cathedral's website.
What is Crossbones Graveyard?
An unconsecrated burial ground on Redcross Way used for the poor and for Bankside's prostitutes until 1853. The memorial gates covered in ribbons can be seen from the street at any time; the garden behind them opens on limited hours set by the volunteers who run it.
How long does the Southwark history walk take?
About an hour and a half at a slow pace for roughly two kilometres, from the George Inn on Borough High Street to Blackfriars Bridge. Adding the Old Operating Theatre Museum or the Clink Prison Museum makes it a half-day.
Sources
- National Trust - George Inn, Southwark (checked September 2026)
- Southwark Cathedral - Visiting information (checked September 2026)
- Tate - Visit Tate Modern (checked September 2026)
- London Borough of Southwark - Local history and heritage (checked September 2026)
- Transport for London - River services and piers (checked September 2026)