The south side of London Bridge has been London's commercial gateway from the south for a thousand years. The Romans built the original London Bridge here around 50 AD; the medieval city placed its main entrance from the south at the foot of the bridge; the inns where Chaucer's pilgrims gathered before their walk to Canterbury were on Borough High Street; the wholesale market that supplied medieval London's south-of-the-river food trade started here in 1014 and is still trading. Bermondsey - the neighbourhood to the east - was the leather quarter, then the brewery quarter, then the docklands quarter, then, after the docks closed in the 1980s, the post-industrial neighbourhood that became the craft-food district of the 21st century. The two together are the food-and-drink heart of south London.
The market: a thousand years old
Borough Market's documentary record begins in 1014 with a Norwegian saga that mentions a market on this approximate spot. By the 12th century the market was operating in the streets around what is now Borough High Street, run as a private medieval franchise by the priors of the Hospital of St Thomas. From 1755 the market moved to its current location south of Southwark Cathedral, in space granted by an Act of Parliament. The Victorian iron-and-glass arcades date from 1851 (the southern Borough Hall) and 1860s-90s expansions; the railway viaducts above date from 1862 (the South Eastern Railway from London Bridge to Greenwich), which gave the market its characteristic mix of medieval ground-level + Victorian upper-level architecture.
For most of the 20th century Borough was a wholesale market - traders from London restaurants and shops buying fruit, vegetables, meat and fish in bulk from the suppliers based here. The modern retail Borough Market - the one for tourists and Londoners coming for cheese and oysters and sourdough - really only began in 1998, when a few specialty food traders (Neal's Yard Dairy, Brindisa, Monmouth Coffee) opened retail shops in the market's wholesale spaces and started Saturday-only retail trading. The success was immediate; the market gradually shifted from wholesale (which moved out to Western International Market in 2017) to retail. Today the market trades retail Wednesday-Saturday with about 100 stalls; the wholesale operation is gone except in name.
The 2017 attack and the recovery
On 3 June 2017 a terror attack on London Bridge and Borough Market killed 8 people. The market was closed for 11 days while police investigations completed; it reopened on 14 June with a defiant return-to-business and a public memorial in the area. The market has been busier than ever since - the locals' response to the attack was to come more often, not less. The borough wears the memory quietly: small commemorative plaques on London Bridge, a public memorial just outside the market.
Bermondsey: leather, brewery, docks
Bermondsey - the neighbourhood east of Borough, between Tower Bridge Road and Rotherhithe - was for centuries the leather quarter of London. The London Leather, Hide and Wool Exchange (a beautiful 1879 building still standing on Leathermarket Street, now offices and restaurants) was the trade's centre. Bermondsey Street and the surrounding lanes housed the tanneries, the leather merchants, the boot-makers. The industry employed thousands until World War I; the smell of tanneries was famously the smell of Bermondsey.
The brewing industry was the other Bermondsey trade. Courage Brewery (founded 1787, the dominant English brewery for much of the 19th and 20th centuries) was at Horsleydown Lane, immediately south of Tower Bridge. The Courage building was demolished in 1991; the site is now the Anchor Brew House and adjacent housing. But the smaller breweries - the Hartley's, the Anchor, the Barclay Perkins - left a legacy of railway-arch industrial space that turned out to be perfect for the 2010s craft-beer revival.
The Beer Mile
The Kernel Brewery opened in a Bermondsey railway arch in 2009, making it one of the earliest craft breweries in the UK. By 2012 Anspach & Hobday had opened a few arches down. Brick Brewery (then in Peckham) opened a Bermondsey tap room. Partizan, Bullfinch, Affinity, Spartan all opened through the 2010s. By 2018 about 12 craft breweries operated in walking distance of each other - the "Bermondsey Beer Mile" was a thing.
Some have closed (the rise in commercial rates hit hard after 2018); others have opened. The 2026 lineup is shifting - The Kernel and Anspach & Hobday are the anchors; Partizan and Brick are the established players; Affinity, Spartan and Bullfinch are newer. The tap rooms are mostly Friday-Saturday only; some are Thursday-Sunday. Beer is sold in plastic glasses (you walk between tap rooms with your drink), cans (most breweries sell cans for taking home), and rarely in proper glassware. Food trucks set up outside on weekends. The Mile is now a Saturday-afternoon tradition for thousands of Londoners and an institution in the global craft-beer scene.
Bermondsey Street and the design quarter
Bermondsey Street itself - the 1.2-km street running from London Bridge south to Tower Bridge Road - has reinvented itself in the 2010s as a design and food quarter. The White Cube Bermondsey gallery (the larger of the two White Cube galleries, opened 2011 in a converted warehouse) shows major international contemporary art - free, daily 10:00-18:00. The Fashion and Textile Museum (Zandra Rhodes's bright-pink-and-blue Mexican-style building, 2003) hosts changing fashion exhibitions. The restaurants - José tapas, Pizarro, Bar Tozino - are the spine. Independent boutiques, design shops, the Bermondsey Street Festival every September (free street party) round out the offering.
The Shard and the modern skyline
The Shard - Renzo Piano's 310-metre tower opened in 2012 - is the visible newcomer in the neighbourhood. The view from floors 68-72 is genuinely impressive: London laid out east-west, the Thames bisecting it, the Tower of London immediately below, the City to the west, Greenwich to the east, the City Airport visible on a clear day. Tickets £32-45. The lower-floor bars and restaurants give nearly-the-same view for the price of a drink. The Shangri-La hotel occupies floors 34-52; the offices below are mostly News Corporation and its sub-companies.
HMS Belfast - the 1936 Royal Navy cruiser permanently moored in the river just east of London Bridge - is the eastern anchor of any Borough walk before crossing Tower Bridge. The whole stretch from Borough Market east to Tower Bridge, with the Shard rising overhead, the river on the left, the breweries and design quarter on the right, is one of the city's most-walked half-mile routes. Walking it takes 25 minutes; doing it properly takes 4 hours.
