Industrial Southwark

Until fairly recently, Southwark was one of London's industrial centres.

Farms and fruit orchards

Agriculture was the first major industry in Southwark. In the 1200s watermills were built on Bankside to grind corn. In the 1700s Peckham and Camberwell were farming areas. Walworth was famous for its fruit orchards and market gardens.

In the 1400s and 1500s many small trades and industries were set up by refugees fleeing religious persecution in Europe.

Glass and Delftware

Immigrants introduced delftware pottery from Holland and it was produced in large quantities in Southwark. Glass-making was a major industry because the coal fired glass furnaces were banned from the City of London.

Smelly leather

By 1700, Southwark was the centre of the leather tanning trade, a noxious industry banned by the City of London. In 1792 a third of all the processed leather in the country came from Bermondsey. Hat manufacturing was also another dangerous and polluting industry that Southwark specialised in. The hat making process discharged large amounts of poisonous mercury into local streams that eventaully emptied into the Thames.

Inns and breweries

From the 1600s onwards Southwark was a major force in the brewing trade. The largest Brewery in London during the 1800s was the Anchor Brewery in Park Street.

Breweries were established in Southwark because they were connected to inns and Southwark was near Kent where most of the hops were grown. The area around the Borough was the centre of the hop trade and you can still visit the magnificant Hop Exchange building off Borough High Street.

Shipbuilding

Rotherhithe was home to the shipbuilding and ship breaking industries until the 1820s. The Rotherhithe firm Randall and Brent built a number of ships for the Royal Navy and the East India Company. Trades such as ships chandlers shops and rope manufacturies were located all over Southwark but particularly on the Thames foreshore.

Docks and warehouses

The docks and warehouses were another source of employment. Rotherhithe's Howland Great Wet Dock opened in 1700. It later merged with the other docks to form the Surrey Commercial Docks. The docks in Southwark provided work for thousands before their eventual closure in the early 1970s.

The larder of London

With the docks came the food processing and manufacturing industries. Many Southwark companies became household names including Pearce Duff's, Crosse and Blackwell's, Hartley's Jam, Peek Freans and Oxo. The Southwark food factories were major employers throughout most of the 20th century. By the mid 1980s all these firms had closed or relocated because of the closure of the docks and difficulties with transportation.

Commerce today

Southwark is no longer dominated by docks, warehouses, leather and food processing. Today the retail, tourism, creative industries and the financial services are dominant.

However Southwark's industrial legacy is still evident in the environment and buildings of Bankside, Rotherhithe and Bermondsey.