Redcross Way

The street was known as Red Cross Street from at least the 17th century, and two competing traditions explain the name — one triumphal, one uncomfortable. The first links it to the Cross of St George and Henry V’s procession across Borough High Street following Agincourt in 1415: local tradition holds the street was renamed in honour of the English victory’s emblem. The story is vivid but undocumented in authoritative sources.

The second tradition is harder to romanticise. Women working in the Liberty of the Clink — the strip of Southwark licensed brothels beyond City of London jurisdiction — were required by ordinance to wear red head-scarves as a mark of their trade. The Survey of London records a ‘Red Cross Alley’ in local documents, suggesting the name may have been embedded in street-level use long before any triumphal procession could have claimed it. The exact origin remains uncertain, and the ambiguity feels appropriate for a street that has always held multiple truths at once.

The defining fact of Redcross Way is Cross Bones: an unconsecrated burial ground on the street’s eastern side, opened as an interment place for women the Church of England refused to bury in consecrated earth. The Winchester Geese — sex workers licensed and taxed by the Bishops of Winchester within the Liberty of the Clink — were denied Christian burial despite operating legally under episcopal sanction. Cross Bones was the solution: unconsecrated land where the tolerated became, at death, the outcast.

Cross Bones lay largely forgotten until the 1990s, when writer and activist John Constable (b. 1956) began working with the burial ground’s history. His The Southwark Mysteries — a cycle of poems and mystery play — grew from the street’s story and was performed at Shakespeare’s Globe and Southwark Cathedral on 23 April 2000, bringing the unconsecrated dead symbolically back into the sacred spaces that had once refused them. Since October 1998, a short ceremony has been held at the Redcross Way gates on the 23rd of each month by the Friends of Cross Bones.

On the same street, Octavia Hill’s six Red Cross Cottages (1887) — designed by Elijah Hoole with gabled fronts, mullioned windows, and tile-hanging — remain standing and are Grade II listed. The garden behind them was restored to its original Victorian design in 2005 and formally reopened by the Princess Royal in 2006.

Redcross Way runs less than 400 metres from Union Street south to Marshalsea Road. It is quieter than its neighbours — Borough Market is several streets north, Flat Iron Square’s railway arches are immediately beyond the top of the street — and the Cross Bones gate, usually heavy with tied ribbons and faded notes, is the first thing that arrests a visitor’s attention. Behind it, the Crossbones Garden of Remembrance is open to the public. A few steps further south, Red Cross Garden offers a different green: Octavia Hill’s Victorian outdoor sitting room, restored and tree-lined, with the Grade II listed cottages overlooking it from the east.

Together, the two spaces give Redcross Way a quality rare in this part of the borough: quiet, planted, and dense with accumulated meaning across five centuries.