Talbot Road

The passage between 85 and 87 Borough High Street is easy to miss. A blue plaque marks the entrance — the only sign that this is where Chaucer set the opening of The Canterbury Tales. Today it’s a service route to Guy’s Hospital. The Victorian brick arch and a stretch of warehouse wall are all that remain.

1812

The Talbot Inn in 1812 — the coaching inn whose name and yard survive as Talbot Road today

Yale Center for British Art · CC0

1831

The inn as it stood in 1831, two decades before demolition cleared the site for Victorian development

Public domain

2003

The blue plaque in Talbot Yard unveiled by Terry Jones in 2003, marking where the inn once stood

CC BY-SA 4.0

Today

The flank wall of Guy’s Hospital, visible from Talbot Road — a Victorian institution that absorbed the Talbot Inn site entirely

Geograph · CC BY-SA 2.0

Talbot doesn’t come from a family or a landowner — it comes from a dog. The inn that stood here from c. 1304 was called the Tabard, after the sleeveless heraldic coat worn by knights. This was Chaucer’s inn — the starting point for the Canterbury pilgrimage in The Canterbury Tales. When the Southwark Fire of 1676 destroyed it, the rebuilt inn’s sign was changed from ‘Tabard’ to ‘Talbot’ — a Norman hunting hound. Whether the mistake was the landlord’s or a signwriter’s, nobody corrected it. The road inherited the error, and so Chaucer’s famous inn is remembered today by a dog’s name.

The Tabard Inn was built around 1304 by the Abbot of Hyde — a Winchester churchman who needed lodgings in London. It sat on Borough High Street at the junction of the roads to Canterbury and Dover, making it the first stop for almost everyone entering the city from the south. It was probably the oldest formal inn on the street.

Because Southwark sat outside City of London jurisdiction, the inn's yard was a free-for-all: pilgrims heading to Canterbury rubbed shoulders with criminals, traders, and prostitutes known as the ‘Winchester Geese’. After the Dissolution of the Monasteries it passed into private hands, and by the early 18th century the rebuilt Talbot was thriving again as a major coaching stop for mail and stage coaches heading south.

The railways ended that. London Bridge Station opened in 1836, and within a generation the stabling yards had been given over to parcels offices. The inn was auctioned in 1873 and demolished. The site became a hop warehouse yard — a trade that defined this part of Borough until the 20th century — leaving just the brick arch and the name.

Harry Bailey, the Tabard’s landlord, was a real person — he represented Southwark in Parliament in 1376. Chaucer put him in the Prologue as the man who proposed the pilgrimage and volunteered to judge it. That makes Talbot Road almost unique: a named character from a medieval literary masterpiece was its actual landlord. A beam hung across Borough High Street until 1763 with the inscription: “This is the inn where Sir Jeffry Chaucer and the nine-and-twenty pilgrims lay in their journey to Canterbury, anno 1383.” It was painted over in 1831. The building came down 42 years later.

In the mid-18th century, the Talbot’s yard became a venue for Southwark Fair — Timothy Fielding staged The Beggar’s Opera there in 1728. That tradition of inn-yard performance connects the site to the origins of Elizabethan theatre: galleried coaching courtyards like this one directly inspired the design of London’s first purpose-built playhouses.

Harry Bailey is the only person connected to this site whose name has come down to us — and only because Chaucer wrote him into the Canterbury Tales. He was a real Southwark politician (MP for the borough in 1376) as well as the fictional master of ceremonies for the pilgrimage. John Stow, writing in 1598, confirmed the inn was still called the Tabard at that date — which makes the post-fire name change feel even more careless. A name that had survived 400 years was gone within a year of the fire.

A few streets away, archaeologists from MOLA have been digging up the Liberty of Southwark development site. They found a Roman rest stop built around AD 72, then in 2022 the largest Roman mosaic in London for 50 years, then in 2023 Britain’s most intact Roman mausoleum. This corner of SE1 has been in continuous use since the Romans founded Londinium.

The passage itself is unchanged. The same gap between 85–87 Borough High Street — the width of the original coaching arch — still leads through to Guy’s Hospital.

Most people walk past without noticing it. The entrance is between two shopfronts; the arch at the far end is the only architectural survival from the coaching era. Guy’s Hospital is immediately behind. Borough Market is two minutes north.

The nearest green spaces offer a striking contrast to the urban density of SE1. Potters Fields Park, the riverside park between Tower Bridge and Tooley Street, is roughly 12 minutes on foot — a flat Thames-side walk that passes several more historic yards en route.