Thames Side South (Kate Simon)

Bermondsey

The not impossible eighteenth-century spoon in your pocket, wheredo you go from the Bermondsey Market at11 am?  To the Old Vic to see if you can buyimprobable tickets, by a long, erratic walk, looping in and out of docks,across bridges, through tunnels, sucked into coiled alleys, spewed out into broad, explosivestreets,often guided by St. Paul’s in its straw basket of scaffolding across theriver.  (But no mews; the houses thatkept stables built north of the river.)

MagnifyingGlasses, Bermondsey Market

Formerly TheAntigallican Pub

       

    

        At the top of Bermondsey stretches the length of Tooley Street, leading to the Tower Bridge, through streetsnamed Vine Lane—whose corner pub iscalled Antigallican—Weaver’s Lane and Potter’s Fields, leading to a dockstreet whose name is Pickle Herring.   Going southward, Bermondsey dips, as a numberof its neighbors must in this area where streets hold up railway tracks, andbecomes confused with Druid Street and Crucifix Lane ina knotting of dark-gray brick tunnel. To avoid confusion, look for the tunnelthat is Shand Street, and return on it to CrucifixLane,past the warehouses of wine and spirits, a coat of arms painted on old whitewashwhich might be the symbol of Pilsener beer or a private gest.  On the other side of the street Vinegar Yardadvertises the availability of “rough, split hides,”“pinned shoulders,” “pinned bellies,” and the appropriate acids and chemicals for their tanning,somehow uncomfortably related to the wines that come from Jerez and Oportolying in a facing warehouse.

TowerBridge Opening, 1949 

ShadThames Street  

     

  

        Crucifix Lane broadens to St.Thomas’s Street.  It has a smallrestaurant called Guys and Dolls (not to be confused with the King’s Roadwonder) to match the famous Guy’s Hospital.  Its iron gate and classic inner façade seemto be surmounted, through an accident of proximity by a strange bulbousskeletal dome topped by a weather vane. Next door, the Keats House (he was amedical student at Guy’s Hospital), a conglomerate of Gothicky arches, Orientalish stars, Corinthianish columns, and faces peeringout of the stone jungle.  The buildingsuffers additionally from the contrast with the row of handsome, simplered-brick house, a few of them with restrained carved lintels that lead to theold operating theater of St. Thomas’s.

James Elmes andWilliam Woolnoth, Entrance To Guy’s Hospital, 1820

WilliamHogarth, Reward of Cruelty, 1751

       

      

        Hidden for yearsbehind the walls of an old herb attic of St. Thomas’sParish House, the operating theater missed the aseptic changes that affectedall the others.  Revealed by the searchof a burrower among records in the1930s, it stands as a testament to man’spower to endure and withstand, including nineteenth-centurymedicine.

 

LondonLeather, Hide and Wool Exchange

 

BermondseyHero Tommy Steele 

JorisHoefnagel, Fete at Bermondsey, 1569

"Faces peering out of thestone jungle”
 

Text Excerpts from Kate Simon, London Places and Pleasures, NewYork, G.P. Putnam's and Son, 1968