Beyond Borough Market - Bermondsey Beer Mile

Before craft beer, before the taprooms, before the Saturday crowds with their route maps, Bermondsey smelled of rotting hides, urine, and dog filth. In short, industry! 

Episode 11 of Publicity - Your London Travel Toolkit  pulls us south of the Thames to trace the evolution of one of London's most overlooked neighborhoods. 

From stinky medieval tanneries banished across the river by the City of London, the world's largest brewery, Victorian railway arches built of sixty million bricks, post-war council estates that held a community together through decades of industrial collapse, to the night a furious Irish cheesemonger returned from New York, rented an arch on Druid Street, and accidentally started a revolution. 

The Bermondsey Beer Mile gets decoded, Publicity style. Not just as a fun Saturday crawl, but as the latest chapter in a five-hundred-year story about what happens when a place is cheap enough and overlooked enough for the right people to do something important in it. 

The episode where a railway arch becomes the most honest expression of a pub in centuries, and where the smell of malt turns out derives from the same story as those nose curling tanning pits, except now we have Instagram.

Transcript

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Imagine the worst smell you've ever encountered, and it's not what stuck to the bottom of your sketches after a walk across Hampstead Heath, now smeared across your living room by Yorumba, something so aggressively foul that even Henry Mayhew, a Victorian journalist who had seen London's slums, sewers, and meat markets, wrote On every side assailed by the peculiar smell of rawhides and skins and of tan pits. That was Bermondsey 1830. Marketing materials today suggest neighborhood aromas of fermented hops and toasted malt, although the day we visited it smelled of fresh rain, so fresh it was still pouring. The arches blurred as we struggled to dodge flushing range of rain puddles. Bermansey is now home to the Bermondsey Beer Mile, the most concentrated cluster of craft breweries in the world. Two miles of twenty or more taprooms. It's called the Beer Mile in the same spirit that a British summer is called summer, aspirational over descriptive. We'll walk the Bermondsey Beer Mile in today's episode and relax, it's barely even a 5k. Let's talk as we walk before we start, remember to share this episode, the show, and the website with people you think will love it, publicitythepodcast.com. Also join our new Facebook travel community group, London Travel Tips and Planning, and the link is in the show notes. Our admins and members are the friendliest you'll encounter. So instead of jumping into how do I get to the beer mile, let's ask why Bermansey? Why did London's craft beer revolution pick this patch of land across the river from the city between Borough Market and Millwall Stadium? Remember the Dakota Ring tool from earlier episodes? It's the key that unlocks a neighborhood's history, character, why the streets look the way they do, and why the people in them behave the way they do. Usually it's a pub. This time it's a railway arch on Druid Street. No sign. A six point five hectolitre brew kit, built by a cheesemonger who went to New York and returned furious with British beer. By the end of this episode, I'll make the case that a taproom in a railway arch is the most honest evolution of the London pub in the last fifty years. The reason it exists in this postcode goes back 500 years and smells a lot worse than hops. The story involves dead cows, a banker who bought a brewery from a widow, the world's largest beer operation, fifty years of council estates, and a photographer who accidentally named one of London's most famous tourist attractions. This is your host, Xpat Andy, broadcasting from Miami in the Sunshine State. My job is to be your insider guide to the London that doesn't make it onto the highlight reel. The London that's hidden in plain sight if you know where to look. What's past is prologue. Following the Bard's advice, before we cover today's beer, we need to talk about what Bermansey was. Bermansey sits south of the Thames and east of London Bridge, which for centuries was the only crossing into the capital. Roman soldiers, medieval pilgrims, Tudor merchants, and eventually the railways themselves, everything came through this hinge point. Bermansey's past dates at least back as far as the 700s. Pope Constantine refers to Vermandisy, the site of a monastery that would later become Bermondsey Abbey, located in what is now Bermondsey Square. The monks helped reshape the riverside, reinforcing the banks, and turning a tidal inlet of the river Neckenger into St. Saviour's Dock. Bermondsey was also mentioned in the Domesday Book of ten eighty six. Bermondsey's position outside the city of London's control mattered greatly. Medieval girls had no authority here, making it the place to operate beyond their reach. And the leather industry? It did exactly that. Act one. What is that smell? Tannin. The process of turning animal skin into leather, not the sunbed kind, was brutal work. You needed water, vats of ground oak bark, and lots of animal hides. Hell. And also historically, you needed dog feces collected from the streets by workers known grimly as pure finders. Have you ever seen that on a resume? Hides were soaked in this mixture from weeks to months in open pits. The smell was worse than a rest stop bathroom. Don't pretend you don't know what I mean. The City of London simply banned the whole enterprise and sent it across the river. By 1792, a third of all the leather in England came from Bermansey. One district, one third. Families like the Bevingtons, Barrows, and Hepburns built industrial empires here. In 1833, the leather market opened on Weston Street, located in a grand Victorian quadrangle where hides were traded as a commodity. The London Leather Hide and Wool Exchange followed in 1878, a magnificent building on Weston Street, with carved stone roundels depicting tanners at work. Both buildings still stand. There's a decent pub packed into part of the Grade 2 listed Victorian Leather Market building, called surprisingly, the Leather Exchange, which I think is a little bit of a risky name for a pub. You could easily be forgiven for wandering into the wrong bar for your tastes. Wealth built from Leather Exchange came with a cost. Tens of thousands of workers packed into Bermansey, four or five to a room, the smells soaked into walls, clothes, and people. Bermansey was useful, essential, and completely looked down upon by everyone on the other side of the river. Then came beer. In 1781, a city merchant named Robert Barclay, yes, that Barclay family of Barclay's Bank, well he bought the Anchor Brewery along with John Perkins, the brewery's chief clerk. They acquired it from the widow of its previous owner, Henry Thrale, for one hundred and thirty five thousand pounds. Thrale's friend Dr. Johnson, and that's the man who wrote the Defining English Dictionary, he observed, We are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats, but the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice. By 1809, the brewery renamed Barclay Perkins became the largest brewery in the world. It occupied thirteen acres and one of Bolton and Watts' finest steam engines. They brewed porter, pale ale, and a Russian imperial stout so famous it was shipped to the court of the Tsar. The brewery drew tourists, Bismarck, Prince Louis Napoleon, later Napoleon III, and Giuseppe Garibaldi visited. I hope he brought some of his biscuits with him. Garibaldi wanted to shake hands with the Draymond, who in eighteen fifty had beaten visiting Austrian general Julius von Haynau with brooms. Von Haynau certainly had earned his nickname the hyena of Brescia, or Austrian butcher, for his brutal suppression of revolutions in Hungary and Italy. The Bermondsey Draymond took a dim view of this, crying down with the Austrian butcher. Bermondsey had form when it came to beer. The smell was different, molten yeast instead of tanning pits. Yet the principle was the same. This is a place where things get made. This left a lot of empty spaces under Victorian railway arches. Act two Archers Estates and the Dekoder Ring. As rail lines pushed into London Bridge from 1834, the Victorians had to decide how to carry trains through a crowded city. The answer was long raised brick structures with arches at street level. What do rail viaducts built of sixty million bricks need? Bricklayers. Lucky for these bricklayers, there was already a pub nearby, named conveniently the Bricklayer's Arms. Before we get too excited, the pub might have been used by our bricklayers, but its name originated with the coat of arms of the worshipful company of Tyler's and Bricklayers, a nod to the ancient Kent brick trade that supplied London. The Bricklayer's Arms stood at 37 to 39 Old Kent Road on the three-way boundary of Bermansey, Walworth, and Elephant and Castle. Inns have occupied this location for six centuries. The site served as a stop for coaches travelling along Old Kent Road, where passengers heading to or from the City of London would transfer for journeys to the West End. Sadly, the pub was demolished around 1963. Its location, ironically, deemed important for road expansion. The viaduct heading into London Bridge runs for nearly two miles, from Tower Bridge to South Bermondsey. Beneath it, hundreds of brick arches. Bermondsey's rail arches were built between 1834 and 1836 for the London and Greenwich Railway, the first steam line with a London terminus and the first rail arches in London. Before London Bridge station, before the network, before Victoria was even Queen, Colonel George Landman secured an 1833 Act of Parliament and created a raised viaduct from London Bridge to Greenwich, nearly four miles long, with eight hundred and seventy-eight arches, and yes, sixty million of those bricks. The first section opened eighth of february eighteen thirty six. It was served from Spar Road, London's first railway terminus. It wasn't a fancy stone station, more of a wooden platform on top of the viaduct in Bermansey, accessed by a rickety wooden staircase from the street below. It was just a stopping place, really. The fare was sixpence. Trains ran hourly, and there were no services after dark 'cause there were no signals. The viaduct had to be built high on street level arches to prevent blocking the dense streets of the Tanning district near London Bridge. In the barely developed eastern Bermansey of 1836, the elevated viaduct emerged from those crowded streets at Spa Road, heading out above open marshlands, streams, and market gardens stretching outward toward Deptford and Greenwich. Landman's original plan for the arches was for cheap worker housing. Dark, damp homes with trains rattling directly overhead didn't exactly make an ideal living environment. So instead, their inherent qualities of being cheap, structurally robust, and naturally cool lent them to business premises used for lighter engineering, storage, and light manufacturing. 170 years later, a cheesemonger from Waterford Island with a homebrew kit and a grievance above British beer found these qualities equally as workable. The arches are now grade two listed. When you order your pint beneath these original bricked arches, consider that that ceiling was built in the 1830s. Let's get our geography in order before we proceed with the beer mile.

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Just follow my footsteps.

SPEAKER_01 12:46

Start at London Bridge, head south along gentrified Bermansey Streets, cafes, galleries, restaurants, and the Fashion and Textile Museum. Take a left turn onto Druid Street, and everything changes. The railway viaduct cuts east-west through the neighborhood. Its arches stretching towards South Bermondsey. This is the Beer Mile running beneath the tracks along Druid Street, Enid Street, and the lanes between. It's not really a mile, it's closer to two. It wasn't really designed, it just kind of accumulated. Further along past Spar Road, the original cluster, Spa Terminus, the kernel, brew by numbers, places that defined what this was. Further east the arches open into larger tap rooms and destination venues. In between lie the mid arches, no signage, no obvious entrance, the ones you had to work hard to find. And that's where the texture lived. At the peak of London's industrial era, the arches were occupied by workshops, stores, and small manufacturing businesses. They were cheap, dark, high ceiling, naturally cool, structurally sound, and ideal for anyone who needed space and couldn't afford central London rents. The same economic logic as the tanneries four centuries earlier, expressed in Victorian brickwork. Across the second half of the twentieth century, Burmansey's industries collapsed, the docks mechanized and moved, the leather trade drifted north for cheaper labor. The last working tannery in Bermansey closed in 1997. The Barclay Perkins brewery had been demolished in 1981. What remained were the bones of Victorian warehouses, empty units, and rows upon rows of unused arches. Picture it for a second. The industries were gone, yet the people remained. Dense industrial and caught between the city and the docks, Bermansey saw heavy damage during the Blitz. Victorian terraces, home of tannery and dock workers, were destroyed. Postwar housing needs were urgent, and Bermansey a priority. The result was one of Inner London's most comprehensive council housing programs. The LCC and later Southwark Council filled cleared land with estates that spanned every post-war design. 1940s brick five-story walk-ups, nineteen fifties deck access blocks, nineteen sixties tower blocks, and nineteen seventies low risers. The BMR runs through this catalogue of 20th century social housing. Bermansey was a proudly working class, tight-knit, political insular community built around the tanneries and the docks. This community endured after industry left. From the 1970s to the 1990s, the Bermansey community lay mainly ignored by the developers as inner London changed around it. When Dockland's money pushed east in the 1980s, Burmondsey residents fought it, occupying scaffolding and rallying under Bermansey for Burmesey people. Some change inevitably crept in, but the core estates around Druid Street and the railway arches stayed cheap, local, and for now overlooked by the property market. By the early 2010s, the Druid and Enid Street arches were among the few places in central London that were affordable for small breweries. Breweries moved into a neighborhood whose long resistance to development made their success possible. Soon Spar Terminus had become one of the most concentrated clusters of food and drink producers in Europe, yet remained an unofficial Saturday morning word-of-mouth market. Monmouth Coffee negotiated long-term leases on several arches at Spar Terminus, establishing one of the roasteries there. Neils the R Dairy, the London Cheese Institution, set up a maturing and distribution facility nearby. Importers of Italian charcuterie, natural wine, and specialty produce soon followed. So who was the catalyst for this interest in dank Victorian railway arches. His success led him to New York to help set up the Whole Foods Cheese Department. By day he talked about the complexities of cheese terroir, aging, milk, and flavor profile. By night, Americans took him out for beer and they talked about the beer the same way. They discussed brewery histories, hop varieties, and why an IPA tasted like a particular American summer. O'Reillane said later, in America craft beer was a movement. It was really exciting and something I didn't see back here in London. He returned to London and started home brewing. He joined the London Amateur Brewers Club, and in September 2009 rented a small arch on Druid Street in Bermansey, where he started a brewery called the Colonel Brewery. He shared the arch with a cheesemaker called Cappa Casin and an Italian ham importer. The minimal setup consisted of a small brewing kit, a handful of staff, hand bottling, and plain brown paper labels designed by his partner, Tanya. That first Christmas, Neil's Yard sent a few bottles to regular customers. Well, those customers wanted more. O'Rordan had no real sales system. Beer he believed could speak for itself. Traditionally the pub reveals a neighborhood by accumulation, being there for generations, absorbing the history around it, becoming a community gathering place. In 2009 in a railway arch, the colonel reveals Bermansey by repeating the same logic that had made Bermansey. Find the regulatory gap, occupy cheap industrial spaces, do something meaningful in the unfashionable corner that the market ignores. The tanneries knew it, the council estates knew it, now the brewers knew it too. The colonel sparked a wave of London microbreweries, with many passing through its doors or seeking or reordains advice. One brewery is not a beer mile, however. That needs breweries, a Saturday ritual, the tendency of good things to cluster, and a clever name. Act three, the Mile Finds Its Name. In entrepreneurial clusters, the first success is always the hardest. Everything else that follows is simply momentum. Once the Colonel established itself in the Bermansey Arches, other brewers began eyeing the same stretch of railway space. In the early 2010s, those arches were among the few places in central London where industrial units were affordable enough to make small-scale brewing viable. They offered high ceilings for fermentation tanks, naturally cool temperatures, and load-in bays. With a 20-minute walk from London Bridge Station, the entire city was within reach. Partisan Brewin moved in. Brew by Numbers, founded by Dave Seymour and Tom Hutchins, inspired by American craft beer styles set up nearby. Anspach and Hobday joined in 2013. Their co-founder Paul Anspach started with a 200-liter brew kit, when most commercial operations start at 800 liters. 4Pure, founded by brothers Dan and Tom Lowe after they exited an IT infrastructure services company, opened in a warehouse at the South End. So the brewery followed in 2014. Each brewery had its own identity. The colonel was almost monastic, with no branding, no tap room, just the beer. Partisan leaned eccentric and experimental with kaleidoscopic labels. Brew by numbers had a geeky approach, number in beers by style and recipe. And Spech and Hobday focused on traditional London styles, reworking porter and stout with modern technique. Together they formed a small self sustaining ecosystem, sharing equipment and ingredients. Trains rumbled overhead, and the air, once thick with hides, now smelled unmistakably of malt. On Saturday mornings, breweries pulled up their art shutters, set up some taps, and invited people in. No gastro pub trappings or cocktail menus, just beer produced on the premises and sold directly. In 2013, photographer and food writer Mac Hickman walked the route, wrote it up, and called it the Bermansey beer mile. The name stuck. One beer journalist later said, a sense of community and identity to an area that coincidentally had a collection of indie brewers. A destination was born. Its founder had been nervous about the area getting too famous. By the mid-2010s, it was mentioned in Time Hunt magazine and the Guardian newspaper. American visitors started making it a specific destination, the way that visitors would make a trip to Borough Market or Portobello Road. A travel guide suggested starting at Maltby Street Market, an artisan food market adjacent to the brewery arches that we covered in episode 9, to eat something substantial before beginning the route. Wise advice. More breweries opened, Hiver beers using honey from London urban beekeepers, Hawke Cider, the first urban cidery in London. Gosnell's Mead, the barrel project whose tap room has a wall of stacked oak aging barrels and an absurd beer menu. By the mid-2020s there were approximately 20 venues on the mile, which by now was technically two miles long. What could go wrong? It don't matter how I got here eventually. Act 4. The Mile Matures Mostly. By 2023, the Bermansee Beer Mile had a problem. It had been discovered. Stagdus, Hendus, groups of fifteen in matching t-shirts who had come to drink as much as possible in a day. Well they were not there for the nuances of a well-made saison. Residents complained about rowdiness, littering, and general chaos on Saturday afternoons. Newspaper headlines followed. The breweries were caught in an uncomfortable position. They needed the footfall, but the footfall was changing the character of what they'd built. At the same time, the economics of brewing were becoming brutal. For pure, one of the original four, changed hands. Partisan closed. Brew by numbers relocated its production. Hawk cider left the area. Spartan and Ebria shut up shop. In eighteen months, four beer mile stalwarts disappeared from the map. Yet the mile didn't die, it changed shape. Just like this corner of London has always done. What's replaced the departed breweries? A tap room specializing in Dutch craft beers. The UK's first sake brewery, Canpie, relocated from Peckham. There's a Mead tap room. Music venues carved out of former brewery spaces. Three Hills and More Beer Company run in acoustic sessions to hardcore metal alongside their taps. Art classes, pottery workshops, the arches that once held tannin pits now host ceramics evenings, pottery evenings, art classes and jazz gigs. Sufficiently gentrified London. You almost want to weep. It's remarkable that the Bermansey BML has maintained an independent ethos without any organization to protect it. There's no charter or rulers about who can call themselves part of it. The larger brands that now dominate the glossy railway arches at London Bridge Station have not migrated down into the BML proper, although some organization and route maps have been necessary for crowd control. Still, the culture the BML Pioneers built has proven more resilient than anyone predicted. Paul Anspach, one of the original founders, told Time Out he found this genuinely mysterious. Perhaps the archers self-select for independence. Awkward, dark, narrow spaces that vibrate when trains pass, will they require a certain bloody mindedness to make it work? Sound familiar? That's because it's the same culture that built the tanneries here in the first place. It sustained the council estates through the decades the market ignored. Find the space nobody else wants, do something important in it, let the product speak for itself. The traditional pub reveals a neighborhood through time, accumulated through generations of community use. The Colonel Brewery reveals Bermansey through logic, cheap industrial space, loose regulation, and rents low enough for the right people to arrive. This is Bermansey doing in 2009 what the area has done for centuries. Go on a Saturday. From London Bridge, walk Bermansey Street to Druid Street and into the arches at Spa Terminus. No neon, no merch, just brown paper labels, and now a tap room with Japanese inspired comfort food. Start there. A table beer if you want to stay sharp. A pail if you don't. Look up. Victorian brick, curved ceilings, trains rattling overhead as they have since eighteen thirty six. Then walk the mile, stop at Ansback and Hobday's arch house, and order the London Black Porter. Chocolatey and precise. Nearby Barclay Perkins once brewed for the Empire. Between arches take in the viaduct, the brickwork, and the council estates. Eras lay it in one place. The industry's changed, but the principle hasn't. This is still where margins allow people to do things properly. That's what the Colonel decoded. Henry Mayhu wouldn't recognize it. Do you think he'd approve? A place built on the industries that nobody else wanted has turned those conditions into something essential. Leather for a third of England's shoes. Porter for a city of four million. Council estates that held a community together through decades of decline. And now craft beer for anyone willing to cross the river and walk the arches on a Saturday afternoon. That's Bermondsey. That's the Beer Mile. Start at London Bridge, head down past Bermondsey Street cafes, galleries, old warehouses, turned luxury flats, and enter the arches. The Western Corps holds, the Colonel Brew by Numbers, Ansback and Hobday, Southwark, the Barrow Project. The Miles founders still anchor it. But what's changed is the experience. Hidden has been discovered. A destination with regular hours and a route map. Head east and you see the shift. A process of selection, not collapse. Partisan, Spartan, Ibria gone. Hawks have transformed. What's replacing them is more deliberate. Beer halls, kitchens, hybrid venues. Food is no longer nearby. It's part of the experience. The mile didn't disappear, it professionalized. Rents rose, operators became sharper, more structured. It's harder to enter. Even the kernel evolved from almost inaccessible to a place you can now sit and eat and stay. The crowd shifted too. Still locals and enthusiasts, but now visitors guided here. This isn't subculture anymore. It's on the London itinerary. It's even being covered in podcasts. Echo figure. Above on Bermansey Street, that process of change, assimilation, it's already complete. Below in the arches, it's catching up. Not ruined, not untouched, just understood. When something is understood, it changes. You're no longer discovering it, you're stepping into something that already knows what it is. Go see for yourself. Decide what you find. I'm your host, Expat Andy. This has been Publicity, your London Travel Toolkit. You may notice a subtle change in the name and the branding of the show. I wanted to send a clear message to the tour guides out there that this show is not in competition with you. We arm listeners with the tools needed that they can arrive on a walk-in tour with a local, on the ground human being, and they'll be ready, focused with their questions, having listened to publicity, your London travel toolkit. Thank you everyone for listening and sharing.