The House by the Thames Read Free Page A

with the trade guilds, were inevitably monitored by the City, as was the traffic on the river. There were rows about Southwark activities being in unfair competition with City trade, but grievances that were essentially economic were often dressed up as moral issues. There were long-running battles about who had or had not the right to sit as a magistrate in Southwark, and how far the Lord Mayor might intervene on that side of the water. Being outside the jurisdiction of London, Southwark became something of a haven for wrongdoers. In fact the Templars, and after them the Knights of St John, who owned what became known as the ‘Paris Garden’ manor, made it into a sanctuary. Here criminals from London could shelter from arrest among rather boggy willow groves, reed beds and ditches full of ‘hedgehog grass’ for 6d. a night.
    Naturally the City and the Crown did not look particularly favourably on all this unauthorised activity across the water. However, at the same time, Southwark was useful to them, in the time-honoured way of out-of-town areas, as a location for hospitals, prisons, almshouses and brothels. There were plans in the fifteenth century, under Richard III, to build a wall right round Southwark matching the walls on the City side and so make it indisputably part of London, but these plans were never carried out. At the Reformation Henry VIII had the opposite idea; he acquired a good deal of land in Southwark, including the priories and Paris Garden, and planned to build a palace and a hunting preserve there, but this did not happen either. Come Dissolution of the monasteries, Reformation, regicide, Commonwealth, Restoration and through a variety of ground landlords including the Crown, Southwark continued to function, more or less, in its own anarchic, fragmented way.
    The only administrative areas that really concern Bankside are the Paris Garden and Winchester Park, both originally within the parish that started as St Margaret’s and then became St Saviour’s after the Reformation. Winchester Park was also known as the Liberty of the Clink (‘Liberty’ implies an autonomous jurisdiction) from the nickname given to the Bishop of Winchester’s private gaol underneath his palace on the riverfront. ‘Clink’ means a latch or other fastening device. The Clink never seems to have been as large or important as the other Southwark lock-ups, so why, for later centuries, it should have bestowed its name as a general slang-term for prison anywhere is a small mystery. Today, the Bishop’s prison has a mythical afterlife in the ‘Clink Museum’ near St Saviour’s, which serves as a sort of general touristic compendium of Bad Old Prisons anywhere. Although it is situated not far from the ruinous vestiges of the palace, it has no connection with the ruin but occupies the basement of a Victorian commercial building by a railway viaduct.
    The name Paris Garden, however, is lost as if it had never been, though it was applied for centuries to a tract of land on Bankside just west of the Bishop of Winchester’s holding. The name seems to come from a very early lessee, Robert de Paris; presumably this origin was forgotten, as later maps sometimes give it the more likely-sounding but misleading names of Parish or Palace Garden. It disappears finally from the records in the early nineteenth century, under glassworks, timber-wharves, and the work yards of the Rennie family, bridge builders.
    Paris Garden and Winchester Park both have a rural sound. Rural indeed they were for centuries, while London became ever more densely built on the opposite shore. Houses did spread from St Saviour’s church and the Bishop’s palace westwards along Bankside, but only gradually and in a piecemeal fashion. For the other fact about the south bank, and a fundamental reason why it took so long to become part of London, is that much of it was low-lying and unpropitious for