On the market streets, the gallery quarter, and the part of London that does not wait for the weekend
Bermondsey Street runs south from London Bridge through a neighbourhood that is half gallery, half working city. On a Tuesday morning in February, when the antique market has come and gone, both halves are available at the same time.
Bermondsey Street runs south from London Bridge through a neighbourhood that arrived at its current character by accident rather than design. The antique market at Bermondsey Square operates on Friday mornings from 4am — a wholesale market of furniture, silver, and the category of accumulated object that dealers sell to other dealers before the retail trade begins. By 10am the stalls have packed up and the square belongs to the neighbourhood. This is the correct time to arrive.
The gallery density on Bermondsey Street is the highest in London outside of Mayfair and the Cork Street cluster. This has come about over two decades through the standard mechanism: affordable space in an unfashionable postcode, followed by the artists and dealers who can work in affordable space, followed by the quality that attracts serious buyers, followed by the property values that will eventually price out the original tenants. In Bermondsey's case the process is not yet complete, which means both stages are present simultaneously.
White Cube Bermondsey is the largest of the commercial galleries — a converted industrial warehouse with 5,000 square metres of exhibition space spread across seven galleries and a flexible underground space. The scale allows for exhibitions that could not be made elsewhere in London. The viewing is free and the architecture of the conversion is worth the visit independently of whatever is showing: the roof lights in the main spaces, the precise calibration of the ceiling heights to the work they are built to contain.
The streets between Bermondsey Street and the railway arches to the east are the working city that the gallery quarter exists inside — a mix of food production, small manufacturing, and the railway arch businesses that have occupied this terrain since the Victorian period. Monmouth Coffee's Bermondsey roastery occupies one of these arches. The smell of roasting arrives before the building is visible. The café operates from 7:30am; the filter changes by the week.
The Bermondsey Tuesday morning — not Friday, when the antique market runs, and not the weekend, when the gallery visitors arrive from Shoreditch — is the neighbourhood's best kept timing secret. The cafés are uncrowded, the galleries have morning light in the roof lanterns, and the railway arches are doing their original work. The neighbourhood is most itself when it is not performing.