Southwark Cathedral

Southwark Cathedral — formally the Cathedral and Collegiate Church of St Saviour and St Mary Overie — stands on the south bank of the Thames beside London Bridge, the mother church of the Diocese of Southwark and one of the oldest sites of Christian worship in London. There has been a church here for more than a thousand years, though it became a cathedral only in 1905; for four centuries before that it was the church of an Augustinian priory, and for nearly four more an ordinary parish church in the bustling, theatrical, often disreputable district of Bankside. Its Gothic walls hold the graves of a medieval poet, a great translator of the Bible, Shakespeare's own brother, and the man who gave his name to Harvard University — an extraordinary roll-call for a church long overshadowed by its grander neighbours across the river.

The origins of the church are wreathed in legend. The Tudor historian John Stow recorded a story he had from Bartholomew Linsted, the last prior, that the church had been founded as a nunnery before the Norman Conquest by a maiden named Mary, paid for from the profits of a ferry she ran across the Thames — the ferry that gave the church its curious old name, St Mary Overie, "St Mary over the river". What is certain is that between 1106 and 1538 the church belonged to an Augustinian priory, Southwark Priory, dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The priory church was severely damaged in the Great Fire of Southwark in 1212, and rebuilt during the thirteenth century in the Gothic style; the cruciform building raised between about 1220 and 1420 gives the cathedral its essential form to this day, and its early thirteenth-century retrochoir, behind the high altar, is one of the finest pieces of Early English Gothic in London. After a further fire in the 1390s, the Bishop of Winchester, Cardinal Henry Beaufort — half-brother to Henry IV — assisted with the rebuilding of the south transept and the completion of the tower around 1420.

At the Dissolution of the Monasteries the priory was suppressed, and the church became the parish church of St Saviour, serving one of the liveliest parishes in England. For Bankside, the riverside strip around the church, was the entertainment and pleasure quarter of Tudor and Stuart London — home to the bear-baiting rings, the brothels of the "Liberty of the Clink", and above all the great theatres, the Rose and the Globe, where the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries were first performed. The church stood at the heart of this world, and its registers and monuments record its people. The Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists worshipped and were buried here: William Shakespeare's younger brother Edmund, himself an actor, was buried in the church on 31 December 1607, his grave now marked by a commemorative stone in the choir, and the cathedral keeps a Shakespeare connection alive with an annual commemoration and a fine modern memorial to the playwright, who lived and worked just a few streets away.

The church's literary and historical associations run deep. The fourteenth-century poet John Gower — the friend of Chaucer and one of the founders of English poetry — lived within the priory precinct and is entombed in the church beneath a splendid painted monument, his head resting on his three great books, one of the most magnificent medieval tomb effigies in London. The church is also the burial place of Lancelot Andrewes, the brilliant Bishop of Winchester who died in 1626 and who was one of the principal translators of the King James Bible, the most influential English book ever printed — his tomb stands in the retrochoir. And in 1607 a child was baptised here who would give his name to one of the world's great universities: John Harvard, the son of a Southwark butcher, who emigrated to New England and on his death left his library and half his estate to the new college at Cambridge, Massachusetts, that was named Harvard in his honour. The Harvard Chapel in the cathedral commemorates him, and it remains a place of pilgrimage for Americans tracing the roots of their oldest university.

By the nineteenth century the medieval church had fallen into poor repair, and its setting had been transformed by the coming of the railways. The great brick viaduct carrying trains from London Bridge station to Charing Cross was built so close that it passes only eighteen metres from the south-east corner of the church, a striking juxtaposition of medieval and Victorian that survives today. The medieval nave, which had become ruinous, was demolished and rebuilt in the 1890s in a sympathetic Gothic Revival style, so that the present nave, though faithful to the medieval design, is largely a late nineteenth-century reconstruction. The parish had been transferred from the ancient Diocese of Winchester to Rochester in 1877, and in 1905 the long-growing population south of the river was at last given its own diocese — the Diocese of Southwark — with St Saviour's raised to the dignity of a cathedral, taking the joint dedication of St Saviour and St Mary Overie that it still bears.

Since then Southwark Cathedral has flourished at the centre of one of London's most vibrant districts. The clearance of the old riverside slums and the regeneration of Bankside have surrounded it with new life: Borough Market, London's most famous food market, presses up against its north side; Shakespeare's Globe, rebuilt nearby, recalls the theatrical past; and the towers of the modern City and the Shard rise above it. The cathedral suffered in the modern era too — it lay close to the 2017 London Bridge terror attack, after which it became a focus of the community's grief and resilience — and through it all it has maintained its round of worship, its renowned choir, and its role as a welcoming, famously inclusive church at the heart of multicultural south London.

From a legendary nunnery by a Thames ferry, through an Augustinian priory and the parish church of Shakespeare's Bankside, the graves of John Gower, Lancelot Andrewes and Edmund Shakespeare, the baptism of John Harvard, a Victorian rebuilding beneath the railway, and elevation to cathedral status in 1905, Southwark Cathedral gathers a thousand years of London's history — its faith, its theatre, its trade and its links across the Atlantic — into one building beside London Bridge. It is the oldest Gothic church in London after Westminster Abbey, and the mother church of a great London diocese — a medieval survivor at the heart of the modern South Bank.