Heritage Walking
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London South Bank and Bankside: From Festival Hall to Borough Market

An outdoor walk along London's South Bank and Bankside, excluding building interiors. It runs from the 1951 Festival Hall, past the National Theatre, the Oxo tower, Tate Modern and the Millennium Bridge, to Shakespeare's Globe, a bishop's ruined palace, Borough Market and Southwark Cathedral. Nine stops, about 65 minutes, ending near London Bridge.

This is a self-guided walk, not a guided tour with a leader: no booking, no fixed start time. See the walking route and the walking map before you go, then follow the numbers — the audio guide plays by itself as you reach each stop. Free, with no app to install and no sign-up.

At ~65 min it fits a half day of independent travel, and joining it to another walk in London makes a full-day itinerary.

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London, United Kingdom · ~65 min · 2.5 km · 9 stops

Stops on this walk

1. Royal Festival Hall

The concert hall built for the 1951 Festival of Britain, with its auditorium raised inside like an egg in a box.

Look at the long, curved front of the hall beside the river. Pale Portland stone, a deep band of windows, and a terrace above them. This is the Royal Festival Hall, built for a festival that ran for a single summer. In 1951 Britain held the Festival of Britain, from May to September. Historic England describes it as a nationwide celebration of British arts, industry and technology. It marked a hundred years since the Great Exhibition of 1851, and it was meant to encourage pride and optimism after the war. The main site was here on the South Bank, and some 8.5 million people visited it. Most of that site was temporary. Its most famous structure, a tall steel spire called the Skylon, was taken down and sold for scrap. The concert hall was different. The London County Council built it from 1949 to 1951 as its own contribution to the festival, and King George the Sixth opened it in 1951. Today it is listed at Grade One. The design is often summed up as an egg in a box. The auditorium is a separate concrete shell, raised up inside the outer building on a forest of columns. Those columns are sleeved to stop sound passing through them. The river front you are looking at is mostly from 1963 and 1964, when the hall was extended and refaced. If you go inside, look up from the main foyer. Its ceiling is the sloping underside of the auditorium itself, the egg seen from below.

The terrace and riverside walk are public. If you plan to go inside, check opening times on the Southbank Centre's website first.

2. National Theatre

A theatre first called for in 1848, finally built in concrete by Denys Lasdun and opened in 1976.

Look at the grey concrete building in front of you. Its floors stack up in long horizontal terraces. The tall square towers above them hold the theatre's stage machinery. This is the National Theatre. The idea is far older than the building. In 1848 a London publisher, Effingham Wilson, called for a national theatre in a pamphlet titled A House for Shakespeare. Parliament only passed the National Theatre Bill in 1949, with one million pounds of public money for a theatre on the South Bank. A foundation stone was laid in 1951, but plans and sites kept changing. The theatre's own history says the Queen, later known as the Queen Mother, joked that the stone should be fitted with castors. The company started before its home. In 1963 it opened at the Old Vic, near Waterloo Station, with Hamlet starring the young Peter O'Toole. Its director was Laurence Olivier. The building was designed by Denys Lasdun and built from 1969 to 1976. Historic England's listing describes reinforced concrete, flat roofs, and foyers that lead out onto walkways at several levels. Inside are three auditoriums. The largest, the Olivier, seats more than eleven hundred and is set at an angle of forty five degrees to the main front. In 1994 the building was listed at Grade Two star.

The riverside terraces are open to walk along. Performances and backstage tours are ticketed, and foyer opening times follow the theatre's own schedule.

3. Oxo Tower Wharf

Banned from advertising on the skyline, a meat extract company spelled its name in the windows.

Look at the brick tower at the end of this long riverside building. Near the top, the windows are shaped as a circle, a cross and another circle. Read them together and they spell OXO. Around 1900 a power station stood here, supplying electricity to the Post Office. In the late 1920s the Liebig Extract of Meat Company bought it. The company made the OXO beef stock cube. It demolished much of the old building but extended the frontage along the river. The company wanted its name on the skyline, but skyline advertising was banned. So its architect, Albert Moore, built the product into the tower as windows. That is how Coin Street Community Builders, which owns the wharf today, tells the story. At the time the building was called Stamford Wharf, and it was London's second highest commercial building. By the early 1970s the wharf was derelict. When Coin Street Community Builders bought it, the only activity was a helicopter port on two barges, and the new owners closed it. An arcaded riverside walkway opened in 1988. A twenty million pound refurbishment followed, and the wharf opened to the public in 1996. Today the building mixes homes and work. Coin Street describes more than thirty design studios, shops and a restaurant on the lower floors. Above them are seventy eight flats belonging to a housing co-operative, with their own entrance. The tower that was built to sell stock cubes now stands over a neighbourhood that people live in.

Coin Street Community Builders says there is a public viewing gallery on the roof with free admission. The upper floors are homes, so use only the public entrances.

4. Tate Modern

An oil-fired power station that closed in 1981 and reopened in 2000 as a gallery of modern art.

Look at the long brick building and the single square chimney in the middle of its river front. This was Bankside Power Station. Since 2000 it has been Tate Modern, Tate's gallery of modern and contemporary art. The architect was Sir Giles Gilbert Scott. Tate says the power station was built in two phases between 1947 and 1963. It shut down on 31 October 1981, and Tate gives the reason as rising oil prices. For years the building stood empty. By the 1980s Tate had outgrown its gallery at Millbank. In 1992 its trustees announced a separate gallery for international modern and contemporary art. In 1994 this redundant power station was named as the site. An international competition drew 148 entries. The Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron won. They kept Scott's brick shell. The machinery was removed, leaving the walls held up by a steel skeleton. Then a new steel frame was built inside the old walls to carry seven gallery floors and to support the brick facade. Tate Modern opened to the public on 12 May 2000. If you go inside, the Turbine Hall is where the generators once stood. Tate gives its full length as 155 metres, and it is used for large single commissions by artists. The chimney rises about 99 metres.

Tate says entry to the collection is free for everyone, and some exhibitions need a ticket. Bags are checked at the entrance, so allow a little time. Exhibition tickets and opening hours are on Tate's own website.

5. Millennium Bridge

A pedestrian bridge over the Thames, opened to the public in 2000.

Look along the slim steel bridge toward the dome of St Paul's Cathedral on the far bank. This is the Millennium Bridge, a footbridge 325 metres long. Notice what is missing. There are no tall towers. The walkway rests on a low, slim frame strung between two Y-shaped supports standing in the river. The idea of a crossing here is old. The London Museum notes that a bridge to St Paul's was proposed as early as 1851. Parliament backed one in 1911, before the First World War put it on hold. In 1996 Southwark Council, the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Financial Times launched a design competition. More than two hundred entries came in. The winners were the architects Foster and Associates, the engineers Arup and the sculptor Anthony Caro. The bridge opened to the public on 10 June 2000. The City of London calls it the first new pedestrian bridge over the Thames for more than a century. About ninety thousand people walked over it on the opening day. Then it began to sway. Thousands of footsteps set the deck moving, and as people shifted their steps to keep their balance, the swaying grew. The bridge was closed within days. The fix was a set of dampers, which the museum compares to the suspension on a car or a bike. The work took more than a year and a half, and the bridge reopened in February 2002.

The bridge is for pedestrians, and signs ask cyclists to dismount. Stand to the side if you stop for photos.

6. Shakespeare's Globe

A reconstruction of Shakespeare's open-air playhouse, built because an American actor found only a plaque.

Look over the low brick wall at the round timber theatre, with white plastered walls and a roof of thatch. This is Shakespeare's Globe, a reconstruction of the open-air playhouse where Shakespeare's company performed. It opened in 1997. In Shakespeare's day this riverbank lay outside the City's rules. The London Museum describes Bankside as London's entertainment district, a place for theatres, bear-baiting and brothels. The original Globe was built nearby in 1599. It was built by the Lord Chamberlain's Men, the company Shakespeare wrote for and part-owned. The Globe thinks his first play written for it was Julius Caesar. In 1613, during a performance of Henry the Eighth, a stage cannon set the thatch alight. Eyewitnesses said the theatre burned down within two hours, and no one was killed. It was rebuilt within a year, this time with a tiled roof, and it ran until Parliament closed it in 1642. In 1989 archaeologists found part of its foundations a short walk from here, beside Park Street. This theatre exists because of one man. Sam Wanamaker was an American actor who came to London in 1949 and went looking for the site of the Globe. He found only a dirty bronze plaque on a brewery wall. He worked for a reconstruction. He died in 1993, before it was finished. The builders used oak, lime plaster and water reed. The thatch needed special permission, because thatched roofs had been banned in London since the Great Fire of 1666. Shakespeare called his theatre a wooden O. The yard in the middle has no roof.

Seeing the inside means a guided tour or a performance, both ticketed through the Globe. The Globe says performances go ahead in rain or shine. The site is cashless, and photography is not allowed during performances.

7. Winchester Palace

One wall and a rose window are all that stands of the London palace of the Bishops of Winchester.

Look up at the tall stone wall with the round window high in its gable. It is a rose window, and its stone tracery holds eighteen small cusped triangles arranged in a hexagon. This wall is the main surviving part of the great hall of Winchester Palace. From the 12th century until the Civil War, this was the London home of the powerful Bishops of Winchester. English Heritage says it was founded in the 12th century by Bishop Henry of Blois, brother of King Stephen. It let the bishops stay in comfort when they came to London on royal or official business. The wall in front of you dates from the early 14th century. The doors in this gable wall once led to the buttery, the pantry and the kitchen. Below the hall lay a vaulted cellar for goods such as wine, with a passage down to the river wharf. The hall itself was richly decorated and used to entertain royal guests. In 1424 King James the First of Scotland and Joan Beaufort held their wedding feast here. The rest of the palace stood around two courtyards. English Heritage lists a prison, a brewhouse and a butchery, and for the bishop's leisure, a tennis court, a bowling alley and pleasure gardens. During the Civil War the palace became a prison. Later it was divided into tenements and warehouses, and the hall vanished inside them. A fire in the 19th century exposed the ruins, and redevelopment in the 1980s finally revealed them. The ruin is now a scheduled monument.

English Heritage says the ruin is open to view at any time, with no access to the interior. The Bankside Open Spaces Trust looks after a medieval-style garden inside the old hall.

8. Borough Market

A market with a thousand-year story, fronted by a portico that was moved here from Covent Garden.

Look at the painted front of iron and glass, with tall round-headed windows and a great fan of glass in the middle. It looks different from the market buildings around it, and there is a reason. It was built for Covent Garden, on the other side of the river. This is the front of the Floral Hall, designed by Edward Middleton Barry and built in 1858 and 1859 beside the Royal Opera House. It was meant as a concert hall annexe and a winter garden. When the opera house was extended, this portico was taken down in the early 1990s and put into store. It was put up again here as a new front for Borough Market and opened in 2004. Historic England listed it at Grade Two in 2008. The market itself is far older. Borough Market speaks of around a thousand years of history. For centuries it was held on Borough High Street, at the southern approach to London Bridge. In 1550 the City of London took control and extended trading from two days a week to four. By the 1750s the congestion on the high street was so bad that Parliament moved to shut the market down. In 1756 local parishioners founded it again on this site, just off the high street, where it has stayed. In 1862 a railway viaduct was driven right through it. The railways turned Borough into a major wholesale market for fruit and vegetables. Supermarkets in the 1980s and 1990s put that trade in doubt. In 1998 a food lovers' fair here led the market to reinvent itself as a retail market for high quality food. It is run today by a charitable trust.

Trading days and stall hours change, so check Borough Market's own website before you come to shop. Keep to the side of the lanes if you stop to eat.

9. Southwark Cathedral

A priory church at the oldest crossing of the Thames, burial place of Bankside's actors, cathedral since 1905.

Look at the west front of the church, built of flint and pale stone, with tall pointed windows and pinnacles. This is Southwark Cathedral. Its square tower rises further back, over the middle of the church, and from close by it may be hidden. The cathedral describes its site as the oldest crossing point of the Thames, for centuries the only way into the City from across the river. The first written record of a church here is a minster mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086. In 1106 it was refounded as an Augustinian priory. It was dedicated to St Mary and later known as St Mary Overie, which the cathedral explains as over the river. The canons also ran a hospital beside it, the direct ancestor of today's St Thomas' Hospital. The east end was rebuilt in the 13th century, after a fire in 1212. At the Dissolution in 1539 the church passed to King Henry the Eighth, who rented it to the congregation under a new name, St Saviour's. In 1611 a group of merchants from the congregation bought it from King James the First for 800 pounds. That was the age of the Bankside theatres. Actors, dramatists and theatre workers were buried in this church. Among them were Edmond Shakespeare, William's brother, the playwright John Fletcher, and the theatre owner Philip Henslowe. If you go inside, a memorial to William Shakespeare from 1911 stands in the south aisle. In the 1820s, plans for a new London Bridge nearly led to the church being demolished. It was restored instead, largely thanks to the architect George Gwilt. The nave was rebuilt in the 1890s by Sir Arthur Blomfield, and in 1905 the church became a cathedral.

This is a working cathedral with daily services. Opening times and any closures are posted on the cathedral's website. London Bridge station is a few minutes' walk to the east.