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The re-constructed Globe theatre on Bankside is just short walk from where traces of William Shakespeare’s original theatre were unearthed in 1989. Plays are today performed in an open-air venue that would have looked familiar to theatre-goes in the late 16th and early 17th centuries when this was the main theatre district. “Daily at two…

In the late 16th and early 17th centuries Bankside was where Londoners would go to catch a play in one of four open-air playhouses. While the Globe is now the most famous of these, the Rose opened first and helped contribute to the district’s notorious reputation. Remains of this pioneering theatre were discovered by archaeologists…

Amongst the tombs and plaques in Southwark Cathedral remembering the great and good, are memorials to those who were instrumental in the development of Bankside’s notorious reputation. One holder of the post of the Bishop of Winchester, who built an adjoining palatial home and profited from local brothels, is buried here. William Shakespeare and others…

Just off Redcross Way in Southwark an estimated 15,000 people are buried in a mass paupers’ graveyard known as Crossbones. For many years the site was largely forgotten until an archeological dig in the 1990s uncovered it. There is a long-established tradition that this was the “single women’s churchyard”, as described by historian John Stow…

In the basement of a former warehouse near Borough Market, lies a small museum charting the gruesome history of one the country’s oldest and most notorious prisons. Entering the dimly lit Clink Prison Museum, located below a branch of steak restaurant Flat Iron, you are greeted by a sign claiming this was “the prison that…