Old Operating Theatre Southwark, London Sightseeing Tour, The George Inn.
DIRECTIONS
Continue through Borough Market and exit left onto Borough High Street. Go right at the traffic lights into St Thomas Street, and enter the red brick tower of:- St Thomas’s Church on the left. Ascend the winding wooden stairway to the roof space of the church, which was once used as the herb garret of St Thomas’s Hospital, and from 1822 until 1862 as its female operating theatre. Rediscovered in 1956, it was restored, and is now one of the most unique and atmospheric of London’s museums. The displays provide vivid glimpses of the science of surgery in the days before anaesthetic or even basic hygiene were an accepted ingredient of medical practice. This informative exhibition gives the history of both England’s oldest operating theatre and St Thomas’s hospital, where Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) founded her School of Nursing. It also provides a lot of detail on the surrounding area when, in the 19th century, it was one of the capital’s worst slums.
DIRECTIONS
Thankful that you were born into a more medically advanced age, go left from the church, and continue along St Thomas Street. Go over the crossing. Bear right and turn left through the gates into Guy’s Hospital, where a statue of the founder, Thomas Guy, greets you. Cross to the covered passage ahead, and pause by the quad on the left, where you will find one of the recesses from the old London Bridge, in which David in David Copperfield was wont to sit. A brief history is displayed.
DIRECTIONS
Continue down the steps. Go right, then right again. Pass left under the arch; bear left, and turn right into:- White Hart Yard. Nothing, save the name of the yard, survives of what was, until its demolition in 1889, the largest of the coaching inns that lined Borough High Street. It was to the White Hart Inn that Mr Pickwick followed Alfred Jingle and Rachel Wardle, following their elopement, and in so doing first met with Sam Weller in Pickwick Papers.
DIRECTIONS
Exit the yard left along Borough High Street. Long ago, the voracious appetite of the railways swallowed up the character of this busy thoroughfare, and it is to Dickens we must turn to recapture it. ‘In the Borough’ he wrote in Pickwick Papers ‘there still remain some half dozen old inns… Great rambling, queer old places… with galleries, and passages, and staircases, wide enough and antiquated enough, to furnish materials for a hundred ghost stories…’
DIRECTIONS
However, all is not lost, for if you turn in through the sturdy black gates next on the left, you will find London’s only surviving galleried coaching inn:- The George, which was built in 1677. Although Dickens only makes one very brief mention of the pub in Little Dorrit, ‘if he [Tip Dorrit] goes into the George and writes a letter’, the place itself is a true time capsule. Turning into the yard from the busy rush is to be transported back to a bygone age. You can picture the long ago travellers and forgotten inn-workers, gazing down from the one surviving gallery as the coaches clattered into view. You can almost hear the whinnying of the horses, the cursing of the stable-hands and the banter of the coachmen. The inn’s interior is as antiquated as its exterior, and on the wall to the right of its middle bar, Dickens’s life insurance policy is displayed.
|
