Bear Gardens

Bear Gardens is a narrow, tightly cobbled lane running south from Bankside to Park Street, tucked away in the shadow of the modern Southbank Centre. To walk it now is to see only warehouse conversions and Georgian terraces—but beneath your feet lies the memory of one of Tudor London’s most notorious entertainments. According to British History Online, this small square marks approximately the site of the last bear-baiting ring, and the alley’s name itself is all that survives of the roaring arenas.

2008

Bear Gardens

Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 2.0

2012

The Bear Garden, Bankside, London

Wikimedia Commons · Public domain

2014

Bear Gardens, Southwark

Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 2.0

Today

International Shakespeare Globe Centre, London SE1 — near Bear Gardens

Geograph · CC BY-SA 2.0

For over two centuries, this corner of Bankside was ruled by bears—chained to posts while mastiffs tore at them, watched by crowds that spanned from servants to ambassadors. MOLA excavations have uncovered the buried remains of at least three of these arenas. The street’s name is a phantom—it commemorates a place that was never peaceful, and an entertainment that seems almost incomprehensible today.

The Bear Garden was a facility for bear-baiting, bull-baiting, and other “animal sports” in the London area during the 16th and 17th centuries. The Beargarden was in existence by the 1560s, when it is shown on the “woodcut” map of the city, though the first specific reference to bear-baiting on Bankside is in an order of Henry VIII dated 13 April 1546. The facility itself was never a garden but a polygonal wooden arena—a donut-shaped structure not unlike the theatres nearby, with tiered galleries surrounding a central arena where bears were chained to posts.

By the 17th century the general area including the arenas, kennels and adjoining houses had become known as Bear Gardens, a street name which survives today on Bankside. The name merged location and function so completely that it outlasted the blood sport itself by centuries. The alley that runs today between Bankside and Park Street preserves a memory of violence—a street named after an arena where the screams of bears and the roar of crowds once filled the Elizabethan air.

In 1573 a Ralph Bowes was appointed Queen Elizabeth’s “Master of Her Majesty’s Game at Paris Garden”. Elizabeth herself, like other royals and aristocrats of her era, was a passionate fan of animal baiting. The Bear Garden was not a marginal entertainment; it was patronised by the Crown, visited by foreign dignitaries, and attended by perhaps a thousand spectators at a time, who paid between one and three pence per visit—the same cost as a ticket to the Globe Theatre.

In 1604, Philip Henslowe and his son-in-law Edward Alleyn purchased the royal office of the Mastership for £450. Henslowe bought out Alleyn’s share in 1611, for £580 (though Alleyn re-acquired his share upon Henslowe’s 1616 death). In 1613, Henslowe and new partner Jacob Meade tore down the Beargarden, and in 1614 replaced it with the Hope Theatre. The Hope was unique: Archaeological excavations revealed a polygonal building with ten sides, with an internal diameter of 16m and external diameter of 24m. The general construction is consistent with the excavated remains of The Globe Theatre. The first play staged there was Ben Jonson’s ‘Bartholomew Fair’.

Yet the Hope was never truly a theatre. At a somewhat later date plays were performed on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, and the bears were baited on Tuesdays and Thursdays. By the 1620s, bear-baiting was the dominant use. The Council of State ordered in 1653 that ’the bear baiting, bull baiting and playing for prizes by fencers hitherto practised in Southwark’ and elsewhere should cease. In 1655 a company of soldiers shot seven of the bears to death by command of Thomas Pride, and in the next year Thomas Walker, then lord of the Clink, pulled down the playhouse and built tenements on its site. At the Restoration, however, the Bear Garden was reinstated in its old place—but the era of public spectacle was over.

Bear Gardens sits at the heart of what was London’s most intensely theatrical quarter. Within a few hundred yards of this alley stood the Globe, the Rose, the Swan, and the Hope—plus the Bear Garden itself, which was as much a spectacle-machine as any playhouse. The Globe and The Rose Theatre were built alongside the bear-baiting arenas and attracted the same audiences. In 1591 an anonymous complainant requested theatre to be restricted as it was harming the bear-baiting business. Both were commercial entertainments competing for pennies. Both drew royalty and groundlings alike.

Next to the cleaned-up warehouse is a recessed building, a Georgian warehouse, that was once The Bear Gardens Museum of the Shakespearean Stage, which illustrated the history of the area’s playhouses and theatres between 1972 and 1994. The museum is important locally, as it’s also where Sam Wanamaker’s project to build a replica of Shakespeare’s Globe was run from. That a museum dedicated to the Globe Theatre was once housed here—on the very site of the old arena—speaks to how thoroughly Bankside entertainment has been forgotten, then recovered, then memorialised.