Walk Three · Three hours

The Southwark
Pilgrim's Path.

From London Bridge to Crossbones Garden, by way of the Cathedral, Borough Market and the lost yard of the Tabard Inn — the south bank as Chaucer knew it, when pilgrims gathered to walk to Canterbury.

Duration

3 hours

Group size

4 to 12

Language

English

Meeting point

London Bridge station

The walk in brief

The half of London the City wouldn't have.

For five hundred years, Southwark was the place London sent what it could not stomach: theatres, brothels, debtors' prisons, women buried outside consecrated ground. The Cathedral, the Bishop of Winchester's palace, and Borough Market all stood within the same three-quarters of a mile. We walk the boundary, slowly, and tell the parallel histories of holiness and disrepute on the same paving.

You'll meet your guide outside the Borough High Street exit of London Bridge station at 09:30 (morning) or 14:30 (afternoon). The walk finishes at Bankside, near Tate Modern.

A small group on a Abbey Creed Tour at the gates of Southwark Cathedral.

The route

Six stops, two seated rests.

A walk that begins in the Cathedral close and ends at the gate of an unconsecrated graveyard — with a market, a coaching inn and a bishop's palace in between.

0:00 · London Bridge station, Borough High Street exit
Where the bridge has always come ashore.

We meet beside the bus stand on Borough High Street, at the foot of the only road into the City from the south for fifteen hundred years. A short orientation on the Liberty of the Clink, the Bishop of Winchester, and why Southwark answered to a different law.
0:25 · Southwark Cathedral (exterior)
The borough's mother church.

Forty minutes outside the Cathedral, in the long lane between the south transept and the river. A reading of the building's two great names — St Mary Overie and St Saviour — and the story of John Harvard, baptised here in 1607, who would give a college its name in another country.
1:10 · Borough Market
A market with monks for landlords.

The oldest food market in London, on the site granted to the Augustinians of St Mary Overie in the twelfth century. We thread the market's quieter edges and take a first sit-down on the steps of the Green Market.
1:40 · The Tabard Inn site
Where Chaucer's pilgrims gathered.

A blue plaque on Talbot Yard marks where the Tabard once stood — the inn from which the pilgrims of The Canterbury Tales set out one April morning in 1386. The yard is small and quiet; we read the prologue together.
2:10 · Winchester Palace & the Clink
Bishop's land, bishop's law.

The surviving rose-window wall of the Bishop of Winchester's palace, then a slow walk along Clink Street to the spot of his prison — the original, that gave the English language a word. A second sit-down on the Thames-side wall.
2:40 · Crossbones Garden
The unconsecrated ground.

The closing twenty minutes are spent at the iron gate of Crossbones — a paupers' graveyard, said to hold the bodies of fifteen thousand outcast women, and tended now by volunteers who tie ribbons to the railings. We stand quietly. Then we say goodbye.