Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Redcross Way
Running parallel with Borough High Street, one block to the west, is
Redcross Way
, a
little-visited backstreet that hides a couple of remarkable sights. The first is
Red Cross
Garden
, the row of cottage-style model dwellings established by the social reformer
(and founder of the National Trust) Octavia Hill, to house the workers of a local rag
factory. The row of houses faces onto a miniature village green, complete with village
pond and even a maypole. Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the street, is the site of
the
Cross Bones cemetery
(
W
crossbones.org.uk). It was on this unconsecrated land that
the prostitutes who worked on Bankside were buried, and later, the local poor were
interred. Local residents have turned the gates, leading to the plot of land, into an
impromptu shrine of messages and tokens to those buried, and the plan is eventually
to establish a Garden of Remembrance. A short vigil is held on the 23rd of every
month around 7pm outside the gates.
Old Operating Theatre Museum and Herb Garret
St Thomas St • Daily 10.30am-5pm; closed mid-Dec to early Jan • £6.20 •
T
020 7188 2679,
W
thegarret.org.uk •
!
London Bridge
The most educative and the strangest of Southwark's museums is the
Old Operating
Theatre Museum and Herb Garret
. Built in 1821 up a spiral staircase at the top of a
church tower, where the hospital apothecary's herbs were stored, this women's operating
theatre was once adjacent to the women's ward of St Thomas' Hospital (now in
Lambeth). Despite being gore-free, the museum is as stomach-churning as the London
Dungeon, for this theatre dates from the pre-anaesthetic era.
The surgeons who used this room would have concentrated on speed and accuracy
(most amputations took less than a minute), but there was still a thirty percent
mortality rate, with many patients simply dying of shock, and many more from
bacterial infection (about which very little was known). This much is clear from the
design of the theatre itself, which has no sink and is made almost entirely of mahogany
and pine, a breeding ground for bacteria. Sawdust was sprinkled on the floor to soak
up the blood and prevent it dripping onto the congregation in the church below. In the
herbarium section, you can read up on the medicinal uses of the herbs stored and have
a go at making your own pills.
16
Guy's Hospital
St Thomas St •
T
020 7188 7188,
W
guysandstthomas.nhs.uk •
!
London Bridge
Guy's Hospital
was founded
in 1726 by Thomas Guy, a governor of nearby St Thomas'
Hospital, with the money he made in the City's South Sea Bubble fiasco. It was
originally established to treat “incurables” discharged by neighbouring St Thomas'
Hospital. With its 469ft-high concrete brutalist tower, Guy's is one of the tallest
hospitals in the world, but it also retains several original eighteenth-century buildings:
the courtyard on the south side of St Thomas Street, with a pretty
little
Hospital Chapel
,
on the west side of the courtyard. It's worth having a look at the interior with its
cheerful light-blue paintwork, raked balconies on three sides and the giant marble and
alabaster tomb of the founder, who's depicted welcoming a new patient to the hospital,
though in fact Guy died a year before the first patients were admitted. To the south of
the courtyard are the old cloisters, which now harbour one of the original alcoves from
old London Bridge, with a statue of the poet
John Keats
(who trained as a surgeon at
Guy's) seated within.
Bermondsey
Famous in the Middle Ages for its Cluniac abbey,
Bermondsey
, the area east of London
Bridge,
changed enormously in the nineteenth century. In 1836, the London and
Greenwich Railway - the city's first - was built through the district, supported by 878
brick arches stretching for four miles. The area became famous for its wharves, its
