Borough Market, at the southern end of London Bridge, is the capital’s oldest market, its recently refurbished glass roofs visible from the hundreds of trains rumbling daily overhead into London Bridge station.

Shoppers come from all over London and beyond to stroll round the market and buy organic meat, cheese, fruit, vegetables and patisserie from enthusiastic and knowledgeable stallholders.

But at the end of last year, government ministers finally gave the go-ahead to Network Rail to widen viaducts into London Bridge to ease bottlenecks on commuter services after a 10 year planning battle.

Local residents and businesses fear that the proposed works will destroy buildings in the knot of narrow Georgian and Victorian streets round the market and threaten the market itself. A Save the Borough Market Area campaign is now gathering steam.

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Ministers are still deciding whether to fund the scheme but if it goes ahead, this area of intriguing cobbled alleyways, small shops, bars and restaurants will, at best, be a building site for years. Now is the time to explore Borough, before the bulldozers move in.

This month’s walk takes you through Borough and away from the river behind Tate Modern, through the Victorian streets round Waterloo and up to the river past Lambeth Palace, returning to London Bridge along the Thames.

Walk highlights

Borough Market
Southwark Cathedral
Tate Modern
The Unofficial Documents Deposited installation outside Tate Modern
Roupell Street
The Cut
Museum of Garden History
Lambeth Pier and Thames Walk

Type of walk: circular (or linear if you start at London Bridge and finish at Waterloo)

Time taken: 2 hours approx (excluding visits to museums and the cathedral)

Distance: four miles approx

The best days to do this walk are Thursday, Friday and Saturday, when Borough Market is open.

Start: London Bridge station (trains from south London and Kent or northern line/jubilee line tube). Come out of the main entrance of London Bridge train station, facing the bus station, and follow the curve of London Bridge Street to the left past the pedestrian bridge leading to Guy’s hospital. At the traffic lights, turn left into Borough High Street. This is the final section of the Dover to London Road, originally built by the Romans, and has always been a main coaching route. Before you start the walk proper through the market on the other side of the road, continue up Borough High Street for a short way to the cobbled street leading to the George Inn. This is London’s only surviving galleried coaching inn and its wood-panelled bars are good places for a pint of real ale and a pub lunch.

Retrace your steps back towards London Bridge, cross at the pedestrian crossing and turn left into Bedale Street, which leads you into the heart of Borough Market. Ten years ago, the streets around Borough Market were a bit tired and shabby, and you were more likely to see greasy spoon cafes than upmarket delis selling bruschetta and panini. But the arrival of the Jubilee line extension to London Bridge in 1999 encouraged developers to start buying up and converting the empty warehouses along the river and inland around London Bridge, and City workers realised that they could walk home in 10 minutes if they bought a loft apartment across the river. Borough Market became a haven for affluent foodies and the surrounding streets under the filled with restaurants and wine bars.

Follow the curve of Bedale Street round with the market to your left and the glass and steel building of the Fish! restaurant on your right to reach Southwark Cathedral through a small grassy garden. Slip into the cathedral to hear the choir, rest in the Victorian nave or look at the circular memorial to the 51 people who died in the Marchioness pleasure boat disaster a short distance away on the Thames in 1989.

Come out of the cathedral gardens the same way you went in and cross to Winchester Walk opposite, then turn left down Stoney Street to appreciate the full splendour of Borough Market’s restored Victorian glass frontage. Turn right into Park Street. Note the shop wall ahead with a faded painted sign saying Andre importeur;Perot exporteur, a reminder of Borough’s important role in London’s food distribution system. Campaigners against Network Rail’s viaduct-widening plans claim that both Stoney Street and Park Street, winding narrow streets, lined with warehouses, pubs and small shops and criss-crossed with railway bridges, are at risk if the plans go ahead.

Continue along Park Street, ignoring turns to left or right. A plaque on the wall of what is now an unprepossessing set of flats at the junction of Park Street and Maiden Lane records the discovery of a Roman warehouse 200 yards away, another reminder of the area’s dense layers of history. Walk through the tunnel under Southwark Bridge Road and continue ahead to an open space which marks the original site of Shakespeare’s Globe theatre, discovered under a listed Georgian house in 1989. The reconstructed Globe theatre lies about 200 yards away on the south bank of the Thames.

At the end of Park Street, turn right into Sumner Street. Behind you is the red brick bulk of the former Bankside Power Station, now the hugely successful Tate Modern, and well worth a diversion – follow the signs to the visitors’ entrance. The gallery has a choice of attractive restaurants with views over the Thames for a mid-walk break (this walk has a dizzying choice of restaurants, bars and snacks of every description).

Back on the walk, work is going on to modernise the electricity substation in Sumner Street. The hoardings around the works are covered with a blown up cuttings from local newspapers and post-war photographs of Southwark and Bermondsey, recording strikes, housing protests and street parties, a fascinating slice of the history of what is still mostly a working class area. The temporary montage was commissioned by Tate Modern and EDF Energy and is called Unofficial Deposited Records, after the file in which the material was kept in Southwark Local History Library.

Follow Sumner Street to its junction with Blackfriars Road, cross at the crossing and continue along Great Suffolk Street directly opposite. The route turns right down Dolben Street and left into Nicholson Street. Emerge into Blackfriars Road, cross at the pedestrian crossing and continue straight on along Meymott Street to Roupell Street. This and neighbouring streets form a grid of early Victorian workingmen’s cottages and corner pubs, huddled against the bridge that brings trains from south London and Kent into Waterloo East, the tall television aerials on the houses marking out the streets for commuters walking over the covered walkway to Waterloo East station.

Turn left into Windmill Walk and continue to The Cut, then turn right past the Old Vic. Turn right again into Waterloo Road if you want to finish the walk here and catch a train from Waterloo.

Otherwise, keep straight on across the pedestrian crossing to Baylis Road and head diagonally right down Lower Marsh, which has had a street market since the nineteenth century. It has an eclectic collection of small shops selling jewellery, clothes and secondhand books and a range of bars and restaurants.

At the end of Lower Marsh, cross Westminster Bridge Road and carry straight on down Carlisle Lane through a tunnel to Archbishop’s Park, so called because it has Lambeth Palace, home of the Archbishop Of Canterbury, as a neighbour and was once part of the Palace’s private gardens. This is a restful patch of green space in an otherwise intensely urban walk. Follow the path round to a gate out into Lambeth Road, turn right and right again into the grounds of the former St Mary at Lambeth Church, saved from demolition in 1977 to house the Museum of Garden History.

The gate on the opposite side of the graveyard leads to Lambeth Palace Road and the river. Cross at the crossing to Lambeth Pier and turn right to head back to London Bridge along the river. If you want a shorter return journey, head for Waterloo, which still gives you one of the best views of the Houses of Parliament on the other side of the river, as well as a close up view of the handsome Victorian parts of St Thomas’s hospital and a walk past the London Eye and the London Aquarium.

Finish: London Bridge or Waterloo (main line trains to south east and south west London, Kent and Surrey or bakerloo, northern and jubilee line tube).

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