is a place in the
London Borough Of Southwark . It is a built-up district located 2.1 miles (3.4 km) east south-east of
Charing Cross .
The area was originally named "Beormund's Ey", Beormund being a
Saxon personal name, "ey" being
Old Norse for "island". At this time it would have been little more than a marshy riverside island. A community of
Cluniac monks established
Bermondsey Abbey on the site in
1082 and began the development of the area, cultivating the land and embanking the riverside. They turned an adjacent tidal inlet at the mouth of the
River Neckinger into a dock, naming it
St Saviour's Dock after their abbey's patron.
The
Knights Templar also owned land here and gave their names to one of the most distinctive streets in London,
Shad Thames (a corruption of "St John at Thames"). Other ecclesiastical properties stood nearby at Tooley (a corruption of "
St Olave's ") Street, where wealthy citizens and clerics had their houses, including the Priors of
Lewes , the Abbots of
Battle and the Priors of
St Augustine , Canterbury.
As it developed over the centuries, Bermondsey underwent some striking changes. After the
Great Fire Of London , it was settled by the well-to-do and took on the character of a garden suburb. A renowned pleasure garden was founded there in the
17th Century , commemorated now by the name of the Cherry Garden Pier.
Samuel Pepys visited Cherry Gardens in
1664 and recorded in his diary that he had left it "singing finely".
In the
18th Century , the discovery of a spring in the area led to Bermondsey becoming a spa. It was from the Bermondsey riverside that the painter
J.M.W. Turner executed his famous painting of ''The Fighting "Temeraire" Tugged to her Last Berth to be Broken Up'' (
1839 ), depicting the veteran warship being towed to
Rotherhithe to be scrapped.
By the mid-
19th Century parts of Bermondsey had become a notorious slum - with the arrival of industrial plants, docks and immigrant housing. The area around St Saviour's Dock, known as Jacob's Island, was one of the worst in London. It was immortalised by
Charles Dickens 's novel ''
Oliver Twist '', in which the principal villain
Bill Sikes meets a nasty end in the mud of 'Folly Ditch' - the scene of an attack by
Spring Heeled Jack in 1845 - surrounding Jacob's Island. Dickens provides a vivid description of what it was like:
: "... crazy wooden galleries common to the backs of half a dozen houses, with holes from which to look upon the slime beneath; windows, broken and patched, with poles thrust out, on which to dry the linen that is never there; rooms so small, so filthy, so confined, that the air would seem to be too tainted even for the dirt and squalor which they shelter; wooden chambers thrusting themselves out above the mud and threatening to fall into it - as some have done; dirt-besmeared walls and decaying foundations, every repulsive lineament of poverty, every loathsome indication of filth, rot, and garbage: all these ornament the banks of Jacob's Island."
Bermondsey Town Hall was built on Spa Road in
1881 .
The area was extensively redeveloped during the
19th Century and early
20th Century with the expansion of the river trade and the arrival of the
Railway s. London's first passenger railway terminus was built by the
London To Greenwich Railway in
1836 at
London Bridge , connecting Bermondsey with
Greenwich . The line ran for four miles on 878 brick arches, with the linked
Croydon Railway opening in
1839 .
From
1899 to
1965 Bermondsey formed part of the
Metropolitan Borough Of Bermondsey .
To the east of Tower Bridge, Bermondsey's 3½ miles of riverside were lined with warehouses and wharves, of which the best known is
Butler's Wharf . They suffered severe damage in
World War II bombing and became redundant in the
1960s following the collapse of the river trade. After standing derelict for some years, many of the wharves were redeveloped under the aegis of the
London Docklands Development Corporation during the
1980s . They have now been converted into a mixture of residential and commercial accommodations and have become some of the most upmarket and expensive properties in London. In
1997 , US President
Bill Clinton and Prime Minister
Tony Blair visited the area to dine at the Pont de la Tour restaurant at Butler's Wharf.
Despite the presence of London Bridge station, Bermondsey's transport links with the rest of London have historically been poor. This was remedied in
1999 with the opening of
Bermondsey Tube Station on the
London Underground 's
Jubilee Line Extension .
