Where the ferrymen sat: a short history of Bankside
Before the bridges, Bankside lived off the people the watermen rowed across the river. Our name comes from them.
Daniel Osei · 31 August 2026
Until Westminster Bridge opened in 1750, London Bridge was the only bridge across the Thames in central London. Everyone else crossed by boat. Thousands of licensed watermen rowed passengers back and forth in wherries, small narrow boats that could take a handful of fares, and the busiest crossings were here, from the City to Bankside.
They had good reason to come. Bankside sat outside the City’s jurisdiction, in the Liberty of the Clink, under the Bishop of Winchester rather than the Lord Mayor. That meant inns, bear-baiting, gambling and, from the late sixteenth century, theatres: the Rose in 1587, the Swan, and in 1599 the Globe. Londoners paid a waterman a penny or two to be rowed across to an afternoon’s entertainment, and rowed back at dusk.
The seat on Bear Gardens
The watermen waited for fares at stairs along the bank, and some had stone seats to rest on. One survives: the Ferryman’s Seat, a small, worn slab set into the wall of a building on Bear Gardens, a lane named after the bear-baiting ring that stood nearby. Nobody knows exactly how old it is. It is easy to walk past, and many people do. We send most of our guests to find it on their first morning.
A ferrier is an old English word for a ferryman. When we were looking for a name for a hotel a few streets from that seat, in a building that had spent a century receiving goods off the river, it seemed right.
Fish ponds, hops and printing presses
Behind the riverbank the land was low and wet. In the middle ages the Bishop’s estate kept fish ponds here, the Pike Garden, which supplied pike and bream to great households and taverns: our restaurant has their name. By the nineteenth century the theatres were long gone and Bankside was wharves, foundries and breweries. Southwark became the centre of the English hop trade, and warehouses like ours were built to keep hops cool and dry for the brewers south of the river.
Our building was a hop warehouse until the 1920s and then a print works, its ground floor full of presses, until the 1980s. The painted sign over the door is the hop merchant’s; we had it restored by a sign-writer from Deptford.
The power station and after
The big change came in two steps. Bankside Power Station, designed by Giles Gilbert Scott, was built after the war and closed in 1981. It reopened in May 2000 as Tate Modern. A month later the Millennium Bridge opened, the first new crossing in central London for a century, and wobbled so much that it closed again two days later for nearly two years of repairs. The reconstructed Shakespeare’s Globe had opened in 1997, a few hundred metres from the original site.
Today Bankside is again a place people cross the river for. They just walk.