One understands what he meant. The term ‘heritage industry’ had not then been invented, but he had sensed, rightly, that something of the kind was coming – had to come, to fill the emptiness left by the retreat of real industry. Fletcher, with his acute eye for genuine, overlooked remains of old London, was wary of the bogus. But the Globe vision was more durable than he supposed, and the architect who became principally concerned in the project, Theo Crosby, did much to redeem the fantasy element in the reconstructed theatre by his meticulous concern for authentic building methods. When you look at the poor-quality modern blocks, bearing no relation to site, that were by then spotting London, and at the later wave of over-sized private developments that now crowd Bankside, the Globe scheme seems an unqualified achievement.
A money-raising Trust was established. It appeared that Southwark Council would look favourably on the scheme, and agreement was reached that in due course the Trust should be able to buy a riverside site – which happened to be almost next door to 49 Bankside, where the Royal Windsor Wharf and Sutton, Sail Maker had once been. A development company was involved, and money was invested in the drawing up of plans. However, in 1982, the Old Left councillors who had seemed a fixture were replaced by a younger generation with a keener vision. Under their auspices, a body called the North Southwark Community Development Group took the view that building a new Globe would be contrary to the needs of ‘the traditional working-class community of North Southwark’. Phrases such as ‘elitist tosh’ and ‘Shakespeare is overrated’ were also bandied about. They had apparently failed to notice that two-thirds of the working population had already moved out to places further south such as Eltham, Penge and Merton, and that any further threat to the borough would not come from history-lovers but from private property developers with their eyes on waterfront sites. They could not, they said, give planning permission for the new Globe after all, because the space was currently in use as a Council yard and store where street sweepers kept their barrows and brooms.
The Globe Trust and their development company took the Council to Court for reneging on their previous agreement. Very substantial claims for compensation were now being made, including one from a property company with whom the Council had made a separate agreement. Eventually, in June 1986, the matter reached the High Court, who found in favour of the Globe Trust. The Council talked of a further appeal, but then backed down. They had to spend some millions of rate-payers’ money on the cost of the case and on appeasing the various claimants. They also presumably realised that their belief that they were acting in the interests of ‘the traditional working-class community’ was fatally undermined when a local poll revealed substantial support for rebuilding the Globe.
Three years later, the foundations of the original Globe were verified as being on the ex-Anchor brewery land, and those of the Rose were revealed beside Southwark Bridge. All those who supported Wanamaker made the most of these discoveries, which were one happy consequence of the wholesale destruction of the Southwark townscape that had got under way by then. Wanamaker and Crosby both died in the early 1990s, but they knew that their dream was going to be realised. The Globe, which had further extended its site over that of the warehouse standing right up against number 49, was triumphantly opened in 1997. The reformed Council were by then assuring everyone that their ‘commitment to heritage was ongoing’.
The transformation of the Power Station into the Tate Modern gallery was not a simple matter either. Up to the early 1990s, it looked as if the site would be sold off for development. But what development? Through the ’80s various ideas were suggested, including an opera house. Theo Crosby (again) produced a splendidly operatic design, reminiscent of a schloss overlooking the river Rhine. His scheme also resurrected the endlessly postponed St Paul’s Bridge, but this time as a slim pedestrian link with the other shore.
But the conservation movement was now well under way and many voices were raised against the demolition of Gilbert Scott’s building. The Twentieth Century Society was campaigning to get the place listed, and a BBC programme was being filmed there with this intention, when it was visited by Nicholas Serota, the Curator of the Tate Gallery. The site had been suggested to him as a suitable place for a new gallery of modern art, but after his visit he became a fervent convert to the idea of turning the existing building into a gallery – which, after a great deal of effort and money-raising, was what eventually happened.
As late as 1993 some sections of Southwark local authority were opposed to this. In the November of that year, the director of the Southwark Environment Trust was writing to The Independent: ‘It [the Power Station] presents a vertical acre of the ugliest ever bricks to the City and to the river, unredeemed by any masterful detailing … the building still casts a miasma of depression … Its construction was a disaster in urban planning, which its retention perpetuates … How backward-looking, how necrophiliac.’7
In essence, this was just the same sort of confrontation as had taken place in the 1830s, between those who wanted to restore St Saviour’s and those who jeered at them as ‘refined gentlemen belonging to the gothic interest’ and wanted the place pulled down.
As had happened a decade before during the Globe saga, when ‘the ordinary people of Southwark’, who had been invoked so often in the past as a pretext for municipal vandalism, were asked in the 1990s if they wanted the building kept and turned into a gallery, they said yes. Southwark contributed a substantial sum of money. The footbridge idea was re-launched, and at last built to a design by Norman Foster. Today, the whole complex has proved popular beyond anyone’s expectations, and for the first time in centuries the Southwark shore seems to have been drawn near again to the centre of London.
This had been an aspiration for a long time. When the Waterloo Bridge was built, the idea of colonising Lambeth Marsh as an integrated part of London was in people’s minds, and the same effect was hoped for thirty years later when Waterloo station began to be built. Neither construction really achieved this end, and nor did the deliberate siting of the 1920s County Hall on the Surrey shore. ‘South London’ remained obstinately other: it was even said to have its own accent. In 1951 the Festival of Britain site, at Waterloo, brought large numbers of outsiders to that part of London for the first time, but it was regarded as an oasis of light and futuristic fun in a nowhere of blitzed townscape ‘ripe for removal’ (Abercrombie language). Similarly, when the South Bank arts complex began to go up on the ex-Festival site, it continued to be perceived as an outpost of London proper, fortunately accessible by an ad hoc plank footbridge stuck to the side of Hungerford railway bridge, rather than in a wider London context.
Even when the walkway was constructed all along the shoreline from Lambeth to below London Bridge, for a while much of it was little used. Around 1990, I often had occasion to walk up river along Bankside in the late afternoon. Once London Bridge, with its newly converted Hay’s Wharf was passed, old London, vestigial London, set in. Borough Market, by Southwark Cathedral, seemed to be in decline – a process today, happily, reversed. In Clink Street, my feet trod deserted cobbles. Like Grace Golden in the 1920s, the Stevensons in the 1930s and the Worsthornes in the 1950s, I felt I was venturing into an unknown land.
Now people walk by the river morning, noon and night, and there are new cafés and restaurants in abundance. The great change has not been due to any structured plan. It has been pointed out to me, by someone who has spent a lifetime observing London, that all the earlier attempts to draw the Surrey shore into the metropolis were official attempts, or at any rate conscious schemes to that end undertaken by public bodies. Yet what has finally made the whole hazy vision of regeneration coalesce at last into working reality has been the two quirky projects which would never have seen the light had it not been for the enthusiasm and determination of a few dynamic individuals. I refer, of course, to the Globe and to the Tate Modern.
People like them. And, because they like them, they come to Bankside and wa
nder along, and then they prolong their stroll, under Blackfriars Bridge and towards the previously isolated South Bank Centre, and so eateries have sprung up to serve them. And, at the South Bank Centre, human serendipity has again played a role, for though the concrete buildings are wretchedly unattractive externally, by today’s more glamorous standards, the otherwise pointless underpass of the Hayward–Queen Elizabeth structure has proved a haven for skateboarders. Similarly, the immovable bulk of Waterloo Bridge, which appeared a tiresome obstacle on the Festival of Britain site and again when the arts complex came to be built, has turned out a haphazard advantage. One span of the bridge makes a ready-made space, outdoor but sheltered from the rain, for the National Film Theatre café and for the stalls of book-sellers. The ‘pleasure ground’ that V. S. Pritchett hinted at in 1962, like the historical tours that Walter Besant fantasised about in 1889, has come about.
It is, however, far too early to assess this take-over of the Surrey shore by arts-and-heritage concerns. Will this prove a long-lasting enhancement of London life? Or will it, along with that fragile south-sea bubble known as ‘the tourist industry’, seem to our descendants to have been a relatively brief Indian summer before the setting in of a new economic Great Frost? Will future slumps, wars, global disasters make the early years of the twenty-first century on Bankside appear a time of luxury preoccupations and lotus-eating innocence? Or will our great-great-grandchildren be grateful to us that we saved and conserved and re-created attractive buildings, even as we are grateful to those who conserved the last vestiges of the Archbishop’s palace or the George inn, or stopped the railway viaducts from strangling St Saviour’s entirely. And grateful, of course, to those who saved the house at Cardinal’s Wharf from disappearing into rubble, splintered wood and plaster dust like almost all its fellows.
After Guy Munthe’s departure, 49 Bankside was sold on twice more. Today, neither slum nor rich man’s palace, it is safe and well cared for in private hands. The high, creeper-covered wall of the neighbouring warehouse, the rest of which has been pulled down to accommodate the ancillary buildings of the Globe, still shelters its hidden garden on the east side. On the west side, Cardinal Cap Alley still runs towards the one-time Skin Market, but the right-of-way has been effectively lost, either during the Globe building works, which occupied a large part of the Skin Market, or when the Midland Bank built a computer centre on another part of it. The ancient alley is currently a dead-end, and to avoid what are politely called ‘nuisances’, the present owners of number 49 have put a locked gate across it at Bankside. You cannot walk into the past that way.
To the east of the Globe, a procession of new blocks of flats and offices, twinkling with lights at night, line the river, just as they do now down the Rotherhithe reach and across the water at Wapping and on many other stretches. The social geography of several boroughs, including Southwark, has been turned back to front. What were originally the ‘mean streets’ and ‘dark dirty alleys’ of waterside Thames are now extremely expensive real-estate, a cosmopolitan ribbon worlds away from the drab hinterlands behind them. In this ribbon, 49 Bankside, with its old-fashioned lamp, stands at night like a forgotten cottage in a children’s story.
Below the raised walkway and the fairylike Millennium Bridge, the dark tides come and go as ever, now largely unregarded. Here and there, at the sites of a few of the old water stairs, concrete steps descend to the river floor, but they are little used. Sometimes, when the water at Bankside is very low, it uncovers the foundations of ancient wooden jetties, places where boats tied up on the gravelly strand before the Cardinal’s Hat was even rebuilt into number 49. Every so often another find – a handmade nail, a copper coin, the sole of a medieval leather shoe – is dredged from the mud where it has been lying while generations came and went above.
London Bridge, as ever, is one of the busiest, in spite of all the others that have been built to relieve it. Every weekday morning a great tide of people comes out from the railway station and flows across it to the City, and every evening the same tide goes back again. ‘ I had not thought,’ wrote T. S. Eliot of them, echoing Dante, ‘that death had undone so many.’
Since he wrote that, another eighty years of London workers have passed into the dark. They have joined the Browkers, Henslowes and Taylors, the Fritters, Shalletts, Thrales, Hornes, Sells and all the others who have briefly walked through these pages, along with the innumerable unnamed poor. When I am crossing London Bridge one winter evening my male companion is accosted by another man, with the gaunt face of an old labourer – ‘Can you give me something, Sir? It’s a very cold night.’ The voice, the manner, does not seem so much that of a modern beggar as to belong to a long, long line of earlier, shadowy figures on the bridge at this spot.
*
In a house that was part of a new street in fields north of the City when the railway viaducts were cutting across the old lanes of Bankside, I am moving about in the kitchen. The young child on an upper floor of the house is in my charge: a baby-alarm speaker stands on a shelf. At first, I just hear the faint snuffles and thumps of a cot-sleeper settling to rest. Then a silence. Then, out of the air, it seems, out of a dateless past, comes a small, clear voice singing:
‘London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down –
London Bridge is falling down, my fair lady …
… Sticks and stones will wash away, wash away, wash away…’
The song was old already when the first of the Sells children were growing up within sight of the old bridge. An earlier version of it was already current when Hugh Browker rebuilt the Cardinal’s Hat, and when the fish ponds were made, and even when old London Bridge itself was built at the end of the twelfth century. Its earliest origins date back to the destruction of a wooden bridge by the Vikings, two generations before the Norman Conquest.
I like to think that small children will still be singing about London Bridge, and even that the house on Bankside will still be standing, long after I have joined the crowds walking away into the unknown.
A segment of Wenceslaus Hollar’s Long View of London, c.1640, showing Bankside with the Bishop’s Palace gardens. Note the Globe theatre and the bear-baiting ring (though in fact these two have been labelled the wrong way round).
The Tudor ‘Fish House’ that originally formed the entrance to the Great Pyke Gardens by Mason stairs. It was not pulled down until near the end of the eighteenth century.
The Falcon Tavern, also Tudor though partially reconstructed in the late seventeenth century, drawn in 1805 when it was soon to be demolished.
1827: the run of houses on Bankside where several generations of the Sells family lived and worked. Number 49, projecting a little beyond the entrance to Cardinal Cap Alley, is instantly recognisable. While the artist (John Chessell Buckler) may have used some licence in the varying heights of the houses as they tail away to the left, his passion for detail lead him to reproduce faithfully the names ‘Sells’, which is just discernable in the original on the gabled house that was by then number 54, and was probably the original house leased by the first Edward Sells.
The View from Bankside, said to be c.1820 but possibly rather earlier. See the Doggetts race crew of watermen with two barges of spectators looming over them. The crew are all in red, and the man working on the quay wears a red cap.
Testimony of Edwards Sells’s first venture into the coal trade, 1755. The ‘P’ for Perronet seems already to have appeared in the family name.
A nineteenth-century Thames Coal-boat, as depicted by Mayhew.
St Saviour’s Church (earlier St Mary Overy’s, today Southwark Cathedral) still had old wooden houses crowding round it in 1827.
St Saviour’s National School, built on part of the Cross Bones graveyard, 1792.
The earliest gas holders on Bankside, 1826, with the actual house in which Sir Christopher Wren is believed to have rented office-space standing alongside. This house disappeared soon after the beginning of the twentieth centu
ry.
The testimonial presented to Edward Perronet Sells I in 1852, on his retirement as Treasurer of St Saviour’s National Schools.
Edward Perronet Sells II, 1815–1896.
Edward Perronet Sells III, 1845–1915.
A view of barges on the Thames from Bankside, 1901 – busy days, as described in Living London.
Bankside 1927, still at the height of its activity. By Grace Golden,
1911: the quay in front of number 49 Bankside, with power station chimney behind. The original has ‘Site of the proposed St Paul’s bridge’ scrawled in pencil on the back.
2004: the same stretch of Bankside, complete with rebuilt chimney (now part of the Tate Modern).
The House by the Thames Page 25