For 900 years the South Bank was the wrong side of the Thames. The City of London - the merchant, financial, royal centre of the country - was on the north bank. The south side was outside the City's jurisdiction, which made it the place where everything the City wouldn't tolerate was sent: tanneries (which stink), brothels, bear-baiting pits, the medieval theatres (which the Puritans considered immoral), the prisons (the Clink, the King's Bench, the Marshalsea), the breweries, the leather workshops. By Shakespeare's time the Bankside was a dense, lively, slightly louche entertainment quarter - bear-pits, taverns, brothels, and the Globe.
The 1951 Festival of Britain
The 20th century made the South Bank derelict. The Victorian railways carved across it, the warehouses fell out of use, the WWII Blitz destroyed huge sections. By 1945 most of the strip was bombed-out warehouses. The post-war Labour government saw an opportunity: the 1951 Festival of Britain - a celebration of post-war recovery, optimism and design - was sited on the empty South Bank between Hungerford and Waterloo Bridges. Architects designed temporary pavilions; the centrepiece was the Royal Festival Hall, the only permanent building, which was meant to be the start of a wider cultural strip. The festival ran from May to September 1951; over 8 million people visited. The temporary pavilions were demolished afterwards, but the Festival Hall stayed.
The wider cultural strip took 50 years to fill in. The Queen Elizabeth Hall and Purcell Room (1967), the Hayward Gallery (1968), the National Theatre (1976), the BFI Southbank (in earlier incarnations from 1958, the current building from 2007), the IMAX (1999) all gradually replaced the bombed-out warehouses. The post-war architects went hard on Brutalism - raw concrete, sharp angles, dramatic cantilevers. The result is one of the world's largest collections of Brutalist cultural buildings, all still working, all still surrounded by debate (some hate them; some love them). The Hayward Gallery was given a £25m renovation in 2018 that kept the Brutalist exterior but reorganised the interior galleries.
The 1990s-2000s rebuild
The next wave was the 1990s and 2000s. The London Eye opened in March 2000 as a "Millennium Wheel" - meant to last five years, now still running. Tate Modern opened in May 2000 in the converted 1947 Bankside Power Station (Giles Gilbert Scott's brick-clad single-stack power station, decommissioned 1981, derelict for two decades, rescued by Herzog & de Meuron's reuse design). Shakespeare's Globe opened in 1997 - Sam Wanamaker's 25-year project to rebuild the 1599 theatre using period materials and techniques. The Millennium Bridge - the pedestrian bridge linking Tate Modern to St Paul's Cathedral - opened in June 2000 (famously, it wobbled when first used, was closed for 18 months for stabilisation, reopened in February 2002).
The Coin Street Community Builders deserve mention here. In the 1970s and 80s the South Bank between the National Theatre and Blackfriars Bridge was earmarked for office development; a community campaign by Coin Street residents fought it through public inquiries, won the right to develop the site themselves, and instead built social housing, the OXO Tower (a 1920s industrial building, restored, with a free 8th-floor public viewing terrace), Gabriel's Wharf (a small enclave of independent shops and restaurants), and the riverside gardens that now connect the rest of the South Bank promenade. The Coin Street wins - by community campaigners against city-hall and developer plans - shaped the modern South Bank as much as any architect did.
Borough Market and the eastern half
The eastern half of the walk - from the Globe to Tower Bridge - is the older, more medieval half. Southwark Cathedral (the parish church the medieval theatre-going Shakespeare attended, parts of the building date to 1106). The Clink Prison Museum (in the cellars of the medieval Liberty of the Clink, the source of the slang "in the clink" for being imprisoned). The Golden Hinde (a 1973 reconstruction of Francis Drake's 16th-century galleon, free to walk past). And Borough Market - a wholesale fruit-and-vegetable and meat market here since 1014 (the year a Scandinavian source mentions a market on this spot), in the current Victorian iron-and-glass arcade from 1850s, transformed from 1997 into a retail food market for visitors as well as locals. The market closed for 11 days in 2017 after the London Bridge terror attack and reopened with a defiant return-to-business; it has been busier than ever since.
HMS Belfast - the 1936 Royal Navy cruiser permanently moored just east of London Bridge, a working museum since 1971 - anchors the walk's east end before you reach Tower Bridge. From Tower Bridge you can cross to the north side and walk back via the City; or carry on east into Bermondsey for the wine arches and craft breweries. The whole South Bank is one of the most-visited walks in the world (~30 million visitors a year), and despite all the tourist numbers it has somehow kept its essential quality: it is a public space, mostly free, mostly outdoors, where world-class culture is half a step from a riverside bench with a sandwich. That is the rare combination.
