Shad Thames

Where it sits. Shad Thames is a narrow, partly cobbled street in Bermondsey that begins at the southern foot of Tower Bridge and runs east behind a continuous row of converted warehouses, set one building back from the river. At St Saviour's Dock the road turns 90 degrees and runs inland along the dock's edge. The name is also used loosely for the surrounding quarter — Butler's Wharf, Java Wharf, New Concordia Wharf, Spice Quay and the streets between them. It is a genuinely unusual piece of London: a working Victorian canyon of brick left almost intact, with the iron footbridges that once carried goods between warehouses still spanning the street overhead at three levels. Tower Hill and Tower Gateway are the nearest stations on the north bank, requiring a bridge crossing; Bermondsey and London Bridge serve it from the south.

The story behind it. In the 19th century the street contained the largest warehouse complex in London, part of the vast wharf frontage that handled the Pool of London's trade. A Victorian description of the riverside runs from Morgan's Lane off Tooley Street through Pickle Herring Street to Shad Thames as an unbroken line of wharves, warehouses, mills and factories on both sides of a crowded roadway. The cargo here was overwhelmingly food: tea, coffee, spices and dried goods, which is why the local street names still read like a manifest, and why the brick of the upper storeys is stained the colour it is. Just east of St Saviour's Dock lay Jacob's Island, the rookery Dickens used for Bill Sikes's death in Oliver Twist and described as the filthiest place in London. The docks declined with containerisation in the 1960s and 1970s, the warehouses emptied, and the whole quarter sat derelict until Terence Conran and others began the conversions in the 1980s that turned the wharves into flats, offices, the Design Museum and a run of restaurants.

On screen. Few London streets have a longer or stranger filmography, and the reason is physical: cobbles, overhead bridges, unbroken Victorian frontage, and Tower Bridge visible at the end of the street. Productions shot here include:

• The Long Memory (1952) and Alfie (1966), the latter at Butler's Wharf
• Oliver! (1968), partly at New Concordia Wharf, on the doorstep of Dickens's Jacob's Island
• Jubilee (1978), Derek Jarman's punk dystopia, among the warehouses
• The Elephant Man (1980), shot partly at Butler's Wharf, and The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981)
• Doctor Who: The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964) and Resurrection of the Daleks (1984), which used Shad Thames as the Daleks' time corridor
• A Fish Called Wanda (1988), with John Cleese's character dangling from an upper storey of Reed's Wharf
• The World Is Not Enough (1999), whose opening boat chase passes New Concordia Wharf and turns up St Saviour's Dock
• Bridget Jones's Diary (2001), Run Fatboy Run (2007), Spooks (2010), Come Away (2020), Cruella (2021) and Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (2024)

Penny Dreadful placed Dr Victor Frankenstein's laboratory at 17 Shad Thames. Bollywood has used the quarter repeatedly, including Viruddh (2005) at Spice Quay Heights and dance sequences for Jhoom Barabar Jhoom (2007) near the Java Wharf buildings.

What you actually see today. Walk east from Tower Bridge and the street immediately narrows and darkens: the warehouses rise five and six storeys on both sides, and the cast-iron gantries that once carried porters and sack trucks between buildings still cross overhead, which is the shot everyone comes for. Butler's Wharf, the largest of the complexes, fronts the river with a terrace of restaurants; behind it the Design Museum's original home stood until the museum moved to Kensington in 2016. St Saviour's Dock, where the road bends, is spanned by a slender steel footbridge opened in 1996 that swings to let boats through, and the tidal mud below it is where the smell of the old river is still honest. The 2B Butler's Wharf artists' space was a significant venue for early British video and performance art between 1975 and 1978, with Derek Jarman among those working there before the conversions began.

Getting there and timing. From Tower Hill, cross Tower Bridge on the eastern pavement and drop down the stairs on the south side — the entrance to Shad Thames is immediately beneath the bridge approach. The full walk to St Saviour's Dock and back takes twenty minutes without stops. The cobbles are original and uneven and there are steps at several points, which makes wheeled access awkward; the riverside path in front of Butler's Wharf is the smooth alternative and gives the Tower Bridge view. Photographers do better on grey days than sunny ones: the street is so tightly enclosed that hard light blows out the top storeys and leaves the cobbles black. Combine it with Tower Bridge, Bermondsey Street's antique shops and cafés twenty minutes south, or the Thames Path east towards Rotherhithe.