The Roman settlement left another legacy. A gladiator’s trident was discovered in Southwark, prompting speculation that an arena may have been constructed in the vicinity where, in the late sixteenth century, the Swan and the Globe theatres flourished. The South Bank has always been associated with entertainment and pleasure, therefore, and its most recent incarnations encompass the newly thriving Globe Theatre as well as the whole area dominated by the Royal Festival Hall, the National Theatre and the Tate Modern.
St. Mary Overie, later St. Saviour, later Southwark Cathedral, became a favoured place of sanctuary for those fleeing from the city’s justice. So Southwark acquired an ill-favoured reputation. There were seven prisons in the area by the seventeenth century (its most famous, the Clink, gave its name literally to other such institutions) and yet there was continual riot and disorder. The neighbourhood was owned by various religious authorities, among them the archbishop of Canterbury and the Cluniac Order which inhabited the priory at Bermondsey, and yet it was known for its licentiousness. The prostitutes of the Bankside, practising their trade within the “Liberty” of the bishop of Winchester, were known as “Winchester Geese.” So there existed a strange oscillation between freedom and restraint which is, perhaps, not so strange after all, in the general pattern of contraries which covers the whole of London.
In Wyngaerde’s map of 1558 the area south of the Thames is intimately connected with that of the north by various lines of harmony, rather like the contemporary map of the Underground, flowing towards and over the bridge. A continuous row of houses stretches for almost a mile along the southern bank of the Thames, from Paris Garden Stairs to the great “Beere Howse” just east of Tooley Street beside Pickle Herring Stairs. It is perhaps worth noting that over a century before Shakespeare’s Falstaff appeared at the Globe, a short distance away, his namesake Sir John Falstolfe owned “four messuages called beer houses here.” In similar fashion Harry or “Herry” Bailey of the Tabard Inn was a real and familiar Southwark figure before he entered Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; perhaps there is something in the air of Southwark which encourages the transaction between reality and imagination. On the “Agas map” of the 1560s are shown ponds, water mills, smoky industries, bear pits, pleasure gardens and “stewhouses” like the celebrated “Castle upon the Hope Inn” which still survives as the Anchor.
The city, in a sense, feared the contagion of these pleasurable haunts. A civic edict of the sixteenth century ordered the wherrymen, who were customarily employed to row citizens across the river to the brothels, to moor their boats at night by the northern stairs in order to ensure that “thieves and other misdoers shall not be carried” to the southern bank. Another form of civic displeasure is exemplified in the fact that although “Bridge Without” had become the twenty-sixth ward of the city “its inhabitants were not allowed to elect their own aldermen” who were in effect imposed upon them. Southwark had become a kind of satrapy, thus ensuring that almost to the end of the twentieth century it remained a relatively undeveloped and ill-regarded place. Yet it was not necessarily poorly administered. The rich or “middling class,” as always, superintended the poor and ensured that travelling paupers were discouraged. The parish vestry collected the rates and distributed poor relief, while the local court supervised all aspects of trade. These suggestions of a relatively self-sufficient community have been amplified in a recent historical survey which concludes that the population of this particular suburb, and by extension of others like it, was relatively stable. The inhabitants of Southwark maintained residence in the same houses and intermarried in the same neighbourhood, as was characteristic of the city in general.
These conclusions tend to support the notion that, throughout the whole of London and its outlying districts, there was a vital and recognisable communal spirit. This spirit has survived over so many centuries that the present neighbourhood of Rotherhithe, for example, is still distinct from those of Deptford and Bermondsey. There is an indigenous or native spirit which animates a particular area. In contemporary south London there are a number of different areas, among them Lambeth and Brixton, Camberwell and Peckham, which have developed beside one another and by some form of symbiosis make up a recognisable atmosphere.
Yet the South remained relatively unknown to other Londoners, except as a source of disquiet. The southern bank fulfilled some of the functions of the “Eastern pyle,” as a boundary zone to which London could consign its dirt and its rubbish. Hence in the early eighteenth century it became the repository for some of the “stink industries” which had been banished from the City proper. The tanneries were consigned to Bermondsey, for example, while Lambeth became the site for noisy timber yards, vinegar-makers, dye manufactories and the makers of soap and tallow. It was reported in the local press that “a society of persons did exist at Lambeth … who made a trade of digging up the bodies of the dead: they made candles of the fat, extracted volatile alkali from the bones, and sold the flesh for dog’s meat.” This sounds sufficiently alarmist to be apocryphal, but there is no doubt that south London already had a difficult reputation. One market gardener of the area decided in 1789 to set up his business elsewhere because “the smoke … constantly enveloped my plants … the obscurity of the situation, the badness of the roads leading to it, with the effluvia of surrounding ditches being at times highly offensive.” South London, or at least those parts of it which were in immediate relation to the rest of the city and could be seen from it, was considered as a poor and disreputable appendage. There was always a form of urban discrimination.
That is why there were so many prisons in the vicinity, as well as institutions for female orphans and asylums for the poor; Bethlem, too, was erected in Lambeth (1815). London was consigning all its difficult or problematic citizens to the South. The area also acquired a reputation for dubious taverns and doubtful pleasure gardens. Establishments such as the Apollo Gardens were under civic scrutiny, and were on occasions closed down by the authorities for “disorderliness.” The whole of Lambeth became known as a “louche and even disreputable quarter.” The Temple of Flora and the Dog and Duck Tavern, situated where the path across St. George’s Fields met the Lambeth Road, was “certainly the most dreadful place in or about the metropolis … the resorts of women, not only of the lower species of prostitution, but even of the middle classes.” South London had once more manifested its ancient status as a haven of sexual freedom. The philanthropist Francis Place recalled highwaymen of the 1780s claiming their horses in these southern fields where “flashy women come out to take leave of the thieves at dusk and wish them success.” It is known that radical insurrectionaries were hunted down in the area, since they were believed to plot and plan in various decaying public houses; just as the music-hall stars of the mid-nineteenth century moved south to Brixton, so those of dubious public reputation like the transvestite Chevalier d’Eon had moved to Lambeth a century before. It was, in every sense, a dumping ground.