The Great Wild West of Medieval Southwark
Joined 2023
Nowadays Southwark is in London but 500 years ago it lay outside City control, an area of Anything Goes. South of London Bridge was the county of Surrey, but the sheriff's job was made hard by private estates with their own systems of law. This was the place to be if you were on the run. The market was outside the City so prices were cheaper driving City authorities wild. Travellers and pilgrims came from far and wide, Bankside was nightlife area renowned for gaming, theaters and brothels.
Itinerary
This itinerary can be customized to meet your needs and preferences. Send me a message with your requests!
Meeting Point
Southwark Gateway Needle or your hotel
North side of River Thames at the Monument to the Great Fire of London
Where the fire of 1666 began
Fish Street Hill and St Magnus the Martyr church
From here walk across London Bridge
Queens Walk east along the river
Tower of London, the Belfast
Hay's Galleria warehouse
Shopping arcade by the river
Ancient Tooley Street and Southwark Cathedral
Borough Market
Spectacular food and people-watching
The George
17th-century coaching inn
Site of the Tabard Inn
Where Chaucer set the Canterbury Tales
Crossbones Graveyard
Former graveyard of the poor now a shrine
Bankside
The Globe Theatre, Tudor entertainment district
Tate Modern
Entry hall just to see the space of an ex-power station
Across Milennium Bridge
View to St Paul's Cathedral
North side of the river
Trig stairs and passageway east
Samuel Pepys pub on Stew Lane
View to Bankside
End at Blackfriars station
Ending Point
Blackfriars Station or your hotel
Want to personalize this tour?
This tour can be customized to meet your needs and preferences. Click below to send me a message with your requests.
Inclusions & Exclusions
Guide fee
Transport, food, drinks, souvenirs
Tour Important Information
This is a walking tour with stairs to climb up and down.
Walking tour, wear good shoes
Important message from the supplier
I'm a guide for walking tours; I don't have a car.
Cancellation Policy
- Free cancellation - 8 days prior to meeting time
- 50% Refund - 3 to 7 days prior to meeting time
- No Refund - Within 2 day(s) prior to meeting time
Joined 2023
About Tour Guide Laura A.
I'm a qualified London guide now offering History Walks with Gender, Sex and Class. Walks focus on the lives of poorer working people rarely described in historical accounts except as criminals or objects of charity. When there’s an opportunity to talk about women I’ll take it, and social class is always on the table. I've been a writer, researcher and critical historian all my life, and I've been a Londoner since the 1960s, although I've left to live in other towns and countries. Author of Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry, for many years I've focused on getting the stories out of women and others marginalised because of being poor, foreign, ‘different’ or doing jobs some folks think are Wrong, in the present and in the past. I'm known as The Naked Anthropologist.
$450/ per group
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After the Puritan Protectorate Londoners went wild. The sex industry became huge and public and London sex-capital of Europe. The walk starts with theatres at a time when all actresses were considered prostitutes and the stage a place for clients to find them. We see where street-walkers and bawdy houses were linked with playhouses, hear about bawdy-house keepers and women who worked in them, homosexual Molly Houses, Jelly Houses, Coffee Houses and Bagnios. Links with criminals are everywhere.
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