Pronounced BURR-munzee. A bit like Chimpanzee and if you change the G to a B then it's also like ‘German Sea’. If you’re one of those witty people who turn Matalan into some sort of Debenhams Designer (Matt Allan) or All Bar One into some Italian bistro (Albaroni) then you may prefer to use the posh ‘Bur-MOHND-see’ pronunciation. Located on the Jubilee line just one stop from London Bridge and in the ‘is that kid following me home?’(1) postcode district of SE16, Bermondsey is home to Shaltby Street Market(2), Shermondsey Street, Shouthwark Park and the Shite Cube Gallery (haha. Good one, Nicole).
In the next few paragraphs, I'm attempting to put Bermondsey on the map beyond being the home of Jade Goody’s mum and in a way that Patrick Wolf’s ‘Bermondsey Street’ album track never accomplished (from that difficult fifth album). You will read a few interesting facts not entirely sourced from Wikipedia, learn some etymology and/or toponymy (and what the words ‘etymology’ and ‘toponymy’ mean if need be) and discover a few celebrity residents you could bump into in the area. So the next time we meet and you ask where I live, I hopefully won't have to describe it as ‘the place where they found the girl’s body in the corporate scandal episode of Silent Witness in the last series’.
In brief, the name Bermondsey is thought to derive from Beormund’s Ey, where Beormund was the name of a local Saxon lord and Ey was Norse for ‘Island’. It’s now definitely not an island but there are various rivers running below ground, historically used to power local paper mills and factories and allowing the Morning Chronicle to coin Bermondsey as ‘The Venice of Drains’ and ‘The very capital of cholera’ in 1849. One of these rivers is the river Neckinger which is now completely subterranean aside from a few man-holes (hence being a useful dumping point for the Silent Witness victim) and only links up to the Thames through St Saviours Dock. As you all know (don't let me down, guys), St Saviours Dock is where Bill Sykes gets it in Dickens’ Oliver Twist and where James Bond’s speed boat leaps out from in The World Is Not Enough.
Neckinger, quite upliftingly, derives from the Devil’s Neckerchief i.e. the hangman’s noose, because they used to hang pirates in the area and display them out above the river as a deterrent to other would-be pirates. I think this sets the scene as to the sort of place Bermondsey used to be, and lets me tell the story of its rise from resting place of uber-villain Sykes to the heady heights of being the chosen location of hit TV show starring Gordon Ramsay and Mary Portas, ‘Hotel GB’.
Away from St Saviours Dock, after Tooley St has become Jamaica Road and you've turned and gone a little way down Abbey Street (presumably named after the now-demolished Benedictine Bermondsey Abbey) you pass the listed Neckinger Mills building, which was first a paper mill before more famously becoming a tannery (at its end, this was owned and runby Bevingtons & Sons Ltd.). Tanneries were a big feature in Bermondsey; huge names such as Hepburn and Gale, The Grange and Bevingtons & Sons meant that in c. 1792, a third of the country’s leather came from the area. In my research I’ve come across several claims that tanneries used to hire lots of women for the finishing process and as a result of working with fish oil in the glazing process, Bermondsey women were renowned for their beautiful skin and hair. Nothing says sexy like locks smelling of kippers and a face glistening with cod liver. Further on down Abbey Street, you also find the ‘Simon the Tanner’ pub, either named after St. Simon the Tanner/Shoemaker (this Egyptian Coptic saint who plucked out one of his own eyes because he saw it in the bible, before helping Pope Abraham to move a mountain) or a local tanner called Simon (“Alwight, Si. Can ya make me some leath-ah boots, innit? I need ‘em to protect ma plates of meat. Fanks, guv”).
Another famous factory in the area was the Peek Frean Biscuit factory, originally founded in Dockhead (read that street sign from a distance) in 1857 before moving to Bermondsey in 1866, which created both the Bourbon and the Garibaldi. Seriously. The exotic Garibaldi is actually from Saaafff London. Named after a folically-challenged geezer called Gary(3).
In 1838, a railway line was built from London Bridge to Greenwich, splitting the Neckinger estate owned by Bevingtons & Sons and creating lots of arched retail and storage units along Druid Street and Enid Street. During WW2, an arch on Druid Street under the railway line also suffered when 77 people sheltering from an air raid were killed by a bomb. This included the parents and sister of Bermondsey website maintainer ‘Bermondsey Boy’(4), from whom I’ve gathered a lot of information/hearsay. Things are looking up for the street now though; whilst no there are no specific biscuitries (is that a word?) in the arches, a walk past these in the morning now provides you with a good whiff of croissants from St John’s Bakery and Bea’s of Bloomsbury (which hosts film viewings in the evenings) and a stinky cheese nasal sensation from Neal’s Yard Dairy. On Saturday mornings, these units open up to sell to the public, fulfilling all of your bread, coffee, grocery and mattress (thanks, Beddy Buyz) needs. You might even spot Andrew Kojima from 2012's Masterchef holding a baby(5).
An essential sporting mention is the proximity to South Bermondsey station of noble footballing greats, and my Grandad’s team, Millwall Athletic. Originally from north of the river, The Lions moved first to New Cross then finally onto Bermondsey in 1993 to their current home ‘The Den’. I’m pretty sure they’re not exactly trying to dispute their rough hooligan reputation by calling their ground The Lions’ Den (also see chants such as “No one likes us, we don’t care” and the recent Millwall chant against Luton about the Taliban) and not even having Daniel Day-Lewis as a fan(6) can counteract one of your strikers being convicted of murder (I hope we’re just looking at you, Gavin Grant). Having started as the football team of a preserve factory (the Scottish-founded J.T. Mortons), they grew in size until WW2 during which they suffered alongside a lot of other British teams with the loss of young men and players in the fighting. The stadium also experienced bomb damage during the Blitz and then a few weeks later, some bozo burned down a stand with a discarded cigarette. You stay classy, Millwall Athletic.
Back into non-violent Bermondsey, and just off of Abbey Street you find Bermondsey Square, location of Hotel GB, the relocated Caledonian Market and Gregg’s Table. There’s also a convenient Sainsburys and cashpoint. Well, convenient if you need some bread and over-priced tinned goods. And cash. From the square, leading you up to Tooley Street and London Bridge station, is the adventurously named ‘Bermondsey Street’. This is one of the rare streets that has actually upped and came (upped and comed?) in frequently labelled by estate agents 'up and coming' Bermondsey. But before Gok Wan and his pooch made it the it-place to let your dog poo whilst you drink a freshly-brewed skinny latte, the street well and truly saw some dark days. It was so smelly in the olden days because of all the tannery work and all the fishy ladies that only the most anosmic(7) or cholera infected stuck around. After years of the road used mainly as a route to Bermondsey Antique Market, the street was eventually built up and is now lined with restaurants, cafes, independent shops and cocktail bars, along with the White Cube Gallery and the London Fashion and Textiles Museum. If you’ve ever visited me in Bermondsey, I may have overruled your google maps route to direct you away from the urine-soaked tunnels and dimly-lit estate paths, and down past the middle-class delights of this street.
In terms of local residents, you may find yourself running into Gok Wan (twice), Patrick Stewart (I wish) and Masterchef’s Buttery Biscuit Base(8) in the form of Gregg Wallace (we did when dining at Gregg’s Table. Subsequent googling of him has made me wary of harmless fish and vegetable meal paring tweets(9) but also made me wiggle my eyebrows and say hubba hubba only slightly ironically(10)). Beormund’s-ey-ians by birth include Boxer David Haye, Entertainer Michael Barrymore, Economist Alfred Marshall and whilst-she-did-think-Rio-De-Janeiro-was-a-person-she-did-signficantly-raise-awareness-of-cervical-cancer-in-young-women Jade Goody. A dream dinner party if ever there was one.
End.
(1) He was already going to the flat above mine, but he definitely didn’t need to speed up (he had a limp, but still managed to catch me up), cross the road and walk directly behind me at midnight, before asking if I’d go up to the flat to hang with him and is teenage mates.
(2) Names have been changed to protect the limited visitor capacity of certain visitor hotspots.
(3) Not really.
(5) This only happened once, back in March 2012.
(6) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millwall_F.C.#Notable_supporters.(7) Google tells me Anosmia is the smell equivalent of deafness or blindness.
(9) Wallace met his third wife Heidi, a teacher from Cumbria who is 17 years his junior, in 2009 after she asked him a question about celery and pollock on Twitter.
(10)http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/12/15/article-2248527-168655FC000005DC-53_306x494.jpg
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