Free The House by the Thames by Gillian Tindall

side of the orchards. The two side paths, Gravel Lane and Bandy Leg Walk, led off from it as well, though as yet these would only have been footpaths to St George’s Fields. The future layout of Southwark was tentatively taking shape.
    When play-going started again after the Restoration, the plays were of a new sort, and so were the covered, proscenium-arch theatres in which they were performed. Fashion – and sin – had moved back to the north side of the river and to the capital’s expanding western quarters: to Drury Lane and Covent Garden, to the Haymarket and Piccadilly and St James’s Park, the districts conveniently adjacent to Charles II’s dissolute court. But it had been twenty years since the watermen had had the theatre-going crowds to ferry to and from Bankside, and probably the general growth of London at that time was enough to ensure their livelihood. The south bank seems to have settled again into its historic separateness, so near to the centre of London yet distant from it. When Ogilby and Morgan produced the first survey map of London, showing properties in wonderful detail, the south bank was excluded from it. Alas, we will never be able to see the exact layout of the Cardinal’s Hat and its outbuildings.
    The years after the Restoration are those covered by Samuel Pepys’s diary, as well as by Evelyn’s far more extensive one: each makes references to crossing the water. Pepys visited the Falcon Inn, and also the Bear, a very old inn beside London Bridge whose landlady, ‘a most beautiful woman’, drowned herself in the river. Evelyn, seeking inspiration for his own garden down river at Deptford, visited the Lambeth garden that had belonged to the Tradescants, and occasionally went to Lambeth Palace – once walking there over the frozen river. Both he and Pepys stayed dutifully in London throughout the terrible plague year of 1665, the Great Plague that has eclipsed in memory all the century’s earlier ones. In September Pepys recorded, looking across the river, that it was ‘strange to see, in broad daylight, two or three burials upon the bankside, one at the very heels of another; doubtless all of the plague; and yet 40 or 50 people going along with every one of them’. Pepys found this ‘strange’ because in London proper, where this time round the Plague had become serious sooner than it had in Southwark, public gatherings for funerals had been discouraged for months. In any case many London burials were now taking place summarily, and by night, in mass pits.
    The processions Pepys saw so clearly on Bankside must have been making their way eastwards from the Cardinal’s Hat area along towards Bankend and hence to St Saviour’s and its churchyard. There was then no other church to the west of Bankside till you came to Lambeth, and no other burial ground for the inhabitants of the parish but the old Cross Bones ground where the remains of the ‘single women’ supposedly lay – and that was not annexed by St Saviour’s as a general overflow burial ground till the 1670s. The popular Southwark idea that there was a plague pit near Bankside seems to have no basis in fact. Deadman’s Place, which was later subsumed into the big brewery, is often cited, but this was a Nonconformist burial ground dating from some years after the Plague. The name ‘Deadman’ is much older than that, and is probably just a corruption of someone’s name.
    The river itself was seen as a refuge from the Plague, though many of those hoping to escape the pestilence carried it with them. According to Daniel Defoe, writing a generation later of events in his early childhood:
    â€˜As the richer sort got in to ships, so the lower ranks got into hoys, smacks, lighters and fishing-boats; and many, especially watermen, lay in their boats; but … the infection got in among them and made a fearful havoc; many of the watermen died