VicLondon-Bermondsey

Bermondsey, South London

District Traits

Interactive: Access {{{Access}}}, Information {{{Information}}}, Prestige {{{Prestige}}} Reactive: Safety {{{Safety}}}, Awareness {{{Awareness}}}, Stability {{{Stability}}}

Notable Locations

x

Class: Primarily Lower Class and Criminal, with a sprinkling of Middle Class.

Part of Southwark proper, Bermondsey is the district east of Lambeth and centred on the gargantuan London Bridge Station and the bridges into the City. Southwark, London, and Tower bridges feed travellers back and forth. London Bridge Station joins the metropolitan area to the southern coast via the London, Brighton, and South Coast Railway, which cuts straight through Bermondsey. The area is generally poor and working-class, but shops, public houses, and wealthier establishments line High Street Borough, Great Dover Street, and the ring road that connects St. Georges Circle in Lambeth via New Kent Road to Bermondsey North Road to Bermondsey Street with London Bridge Station.

Like Lambeth or Whitechapel, much of the area is impoverished, with old houses; some of the oldest buildings in the city once crowded here in the middle of the century, but by 1880, they are swept away in favour of the townhouse and tenement. The people living and working in Bermondsey are often too poor to reside on their own, so many of these tenements would have multiple families living in a tenement house to save money. Transportation is a major source of employment here; the railways, the trams and buses, and cartage all run through Bermondsey, bringing goods from the docks in Rotherhithe to the London markets. The river is also a major source of transport, and barges, punt, and various steamers pack the small piers that line the Thames on the Bermondsey and City sides of the water.

Transportation is not the only industry, of course. On Tanner Street, there is the leather market, a giant roofed building where leather goods are sold to businesses. Here the tanners work with hides, thinning, curing, and cutting them for sale. The place reeks of blood, rotting fat, and the chemicals used to tan the hides (often involving urea). It’s a quiet place and the people here have back-breaking jobs that make them sickly. There is a workhouse not far away where the inmates are involved in piecework contracted by local businesses. These contracts are with the house, not the people, so to gain the work one must be an inmate and remain one. Over on Tolley Street, near the train station, is St. Olaves Union, another charitable house that attempts to nd work, and provides a cheap meal, for the workers in the area. Much of Bermondsey has grown up in the last couple of decades, lling in the space between Southwark Park and Old Kent Road, south of Jamaica and Spa Road.

This region is lled with row homes, tenement buildings, and sloppily constructed stores and warehouses. The streets are small, busy, and like Whitechapel, very poor. The workers here live in squalor, tucking in a warren of tight low streets that fill the countryside between Walworth in and the river.