Mysteries Pilgrimage 2010

John Constable/photo by Dominic Search

TNRA members and friends (17 in all) gather on the corner of Trinity Church Square ready to join John Constable on his Southwark Mysteries Pilgrimage.

Extras, in Twenties costumes, from that day’s filming of The Awakening share the pavement with us.

John, on the corner of Swan Street, recalls the night of November 23 1996 when Old Ted, the Night Watchman, helped link him with bygone times.

We follow the route of John’s pilgrimage up Redcross Way, now no longer the den of vice and poverty it once was.

Gathered in the gardens which served Octavia Hill’s alms-houses we reflect on the changes in our area since medieval times and, indeed, since the conditions shown on Charles Booth’s 1886–1903 poverty maps of London.

Further up Redcross Way we pause at the site of Cross Bones Graveyard, a paupers’ burial ground thought once to be the resting place of the Winchester Geese – prostitutes who worked in the Liberty of the Clink and licensed by the Bishops of Winchester.

In Park Street we stopped at the site of an ‘International Incident’ when draymen from the Barclay and Perkins Brewery assaulted General Haynau, the ‘Austrian Butcher’.

The site of the original Globe Theatre behind Anchor Terrace on Southwark Bridge Road and close to its rival, the Rose Theatre, which we also visited before moving on to the river.

In the wall of The Real Greek, we looked at The Ferryman’s Seat.

John takes a short rest by the river – though continues to fascinate us with his stories.

The surviving remains of the Bishop of Winchester’s Palace.

John and Pam sing us an extract from The Southwark Mysteries, recently performed round the corner in Southwark Cathedral.