Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
speeches with those of the stage greats, plus the odd live demo on the exhibition's stage.
Visitors also get taken on an informative half-hour
guided tour
round the theatre itself;
during the summer season, if you visit in the afternoon, you get to visit the nearby
Rose Theatre instead for a reduced fee (see below).
Vinopolis
1 Bank End • Wed 6-9.30pm, Thurs & Fri 2-10pm, Sat noon-9.30pm, Sun noon-4pm • From £27 •
T
020 7940 8300,
W
vinopolis.co.uk •
!
London Bridge
Housed in the former wine vaults under the railway arches on Clink Street,
Vinopolis
is
a strange fish: part wine bar-restaurant, part wine retailers (there's a branch of the
excellent Majestic Wines round the back), part crash course in wine-tasting. If you've
never really thought much about the plonk you're pouring down your throat, it's a
good place to learn the basics, but tickets (which include at least seven wine tastings)
are pricey. And following a revamp, drinks are now dispensed from a vending machine,
which casts something of a pall over the whole experience. You can charge up your
credit card ticket to include more tastings of wine and other alcoholic drinks if you
don't want the party to stop.
Clink Prison Museum
1 Clink St • Mon-Fri 10am-6pm, Sat & Sun 10am-7.30pm; July-Sept closes 9pm • £7.50 •
T
020 7403 0900,
W
clink.co.uk •
!
London Bridge
Housed in the suitably dismal confines of an old cellar is the
Clink Prison Museum
,
built
near the site of the former Clink Prison, and the origin of the expression “in the clink”.
The prison began in the twelfth century as a dungeon for disobedient clerics under the
Bishop of Winchester's Palace
- the rose window of the palace's Great Hall has survived
just east of the prison - and later it became a dumping ground for heretics, debtors,
prostitutes and a motley assortment of Bankside lowlife, before being burnt to the
ground during the 1780 Gordon Riots. The exhibition features a handful of prison-life
tableaux and dwells on the torture and grim conditions within, but, given the rich
history of the place, it's a disappointingly lacklustre display.
16
Golden Hinde
1 Pickfords Wharf, Clink St • Daily 10am-5.30pm, but phone ahead • £6 •
T
020 7403 0123,
W
goldenhinde.com •
!
London Bridge
At the east end of Clink Street, in St Mary Overie Dock, sits an exact replica of the
Golden Hinde
,
the galleon in which Francis Drake sailed around the world from 1577
to 1580. This version was launched in 1973, and circumnavigated the world for the
next twenty years, before eventually settling here in Southwark. The ship is surprisingly
small and, with a crew of eighty-plus, must have been cramped, to say the least. There's
a refreshing lack of interpretive panels, so it's worth trying to coincide with one of the
tours, during which costumed guides show you the ropes, so to speak, and demonstrate
activities such as firing a cannon or using the ship's toilet. Always phone ahead, though,
to check that a group hasn't booked the place up.
THE ROSE THEATRE
The discovery of the remains of the
Rose Theatre
(
T
020 7261 9565,
W
rosetheatre.org.uk),
the Globe's great rival, beneath an o
ce block on Park Street in 1989, helped enormously
in the reconstruction of the Globe. The outline of the theatre can clearly be traced in the
foundations, but most of the remains are currently flooded to preserve them while funds
are gathered for a full excavation. Close by the Rose exhibition, there's a plaque showing
where the Globe actually stood, before it was destroyed in a fire started by a spark from
a cannon during a performance of Shakespeare's
Henry VIII.
The Rose can only be visited
by tour, as part of the package offered by the Globe exhibition on summer afternoons
(see opposite).
