Bermondsey has always been a fluid, ever-changing kind of place, shoved up into a bend of the Thames, surrounded on all sides but also oddly isolated.
For hundreds of years that whole strip of land south of the city was an interlude of leisure and licentiousness. In his biography of London Peter Ackroyd mentions “bear pits, stew-houses and pleasure gardens”, plus a flourishing grassroots industry of cutpurses and dandy highwaymen, a place where “flashy women come out to take leave of thieves at dusk and wish them luck”.
