‘Here the costermongers, tramps and thieves dwell, in close, ill-built, pestilential courts, in filth, squalor and degradation …’

Twenty-first-century Bankside is on the rise, and quite right too. But the district’s grim past is only a footstep away, lurking in the shadows of a February evening with who knows what intent. Care to join us? You must be out of your mind.

This free, after-work walk will carry you back through the swirling miasmas of urban history, to a chapter in Bankside’s story that you did well to avoid. In the company of Alice Ford-Smith (Principal Librarian, Dr Williams’s Library) and Dr Richard Barnett (Wellcome Trust Public Engagement Fellow), we’ll exhume the lives and deaths of Bankside’s residents and workers at a time when this huddle of docks, slums and workshops was respectable London’s murky mirror-image. 

The walk will end a few minutes from London Bridge station, and just seconds from a cosy pub!

This free guided walk is part of our Bustling Bankside year of walks which take place monthly throughout 2012.