The Southwark Bridge crosses the Thames, connecting the Bankside area from Southwark cathedral to the New Globe Walk.
The underpass, which you can tell was once a dark, gritty, and very creepy place, is enlivened by 5 relief panels featuring a poem about London's intermittent Frost Fairs with scenes from those frost fairs.
The day Blasterz walked through this subway, a man was playing a lovely Brahms violin solo for pocket change in front of the panels.
From Wikipedia: (
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"River Thames frost fairs
Thames Frost Fair, 1683–84, by Thomas Wyke
River Thames frost fairs were held on the tideway of the River Thames at London in some winters between the 17th century and early 19th century, during the period known as the Little Ice Age, when the river froze over. During that time the British winter was more severe than now, and the river was wider and slower, and impeded by Old London Bridge.
Even at its peak, in the mid-17th century, the Thames freezing at London was less frequent than modern legend sometimes suggests, never exceeding about one year in ten except for four winters between 1649 and 1666. From 1400 to the removal of the now-replaced medieval London Bridge in 1835, there were 24 winters in which the Thames was recorded to have frozen over at London; if "more or less frozen over" years (in parentheses) are included, the number is 26: 1408, 1435, 1506, 1514, 1537, 1565, 1595, 1608, 1621, 1635, 1649, 1655, 1663, 1666, 1677, 1684, 1695, 1709, 1716, 1740, (1768), 1776, (1785), 1788, 1795, and 1814. So, of the 24, the by-century totals are: 15th 2, 16th 5, 17th 10, 18th 6.
Frost fairs were far more common elsewhere in Europe, for example in the Netherlands. The Thames freezes over more often upstream, beyond the reach of the tide, especially above the weirs, of which Teddington Lock is the lowest. The last great freeze of the higher Thames was in 1962–63.
. . . ."
From Slate's Atlas Obscura: (
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"The Frost Fair: When the River Thames Froze Over Into London's Most Debaucherous Party
By Allison Meier FEBRUARY 07, 2014
From about 1550 to 1850, the world was in what scientists have deemed a "Little Ice Age." The frigid centuries included the spectacular sight of the River Thames in London freezing over, sometimes with ice so solid people decided to go out and have a festival on the river.
The Frost Fairs were staged on the frozen Thames in 1683-4, 1716, 1739-40, 1789, and 1814. Parallel exhibitions commemorating the 200 year anniversary of the last Frost Fair in February of 1814 are being held at the Museum of London in the City of London and the Museum of London Docklands. Frozen Thames: Frost Fair 1814 shows the winter bacchanalia from the Frost Fair, where the main trade was booze and the principal activity was having as wild a time as possible without breaking the ice.
Through etchings, paintings, mementos printed by enterprising press owners, and even a 200-year-old block of gingerbread — the "only surviving piece of gingerbread bought at the 1814 Frost Fair" — you can get an idea of the joy and chaos of the Frost Fairs. It seems the artists most delighted in showing people falling on the ice (one of the drinks served along with beer and gin was a highly intoxicating concoction called "Purl" that involved wormwood), but you can also spy participants roasting sheep, playing games like bowling and "throwing at cocks" (that seemed to involve hurling things at roosters), and even fox hunting and bull-baiting. Some reports even claim an elephant walked across the ice, but sadly it did not make it into these tableaux.
Of course, every ice event has its seasonal end, and the Frost Fair would conclude tumultuously with the sounds of cracking ice and inebriated revelers scrambling for the shores. While with the current climate and the alteration of the architecture of the Thames it's not likely there will be another Frost Fair, you can find memories of it in the city. Under the Southwark Bridge, Richard Kindersley created a series of engravings on slate remembering the fair with this inscription:
Behold the Liquid Thames frozen o’re,
That lately Ships of mighty Burthen bore
The Watermen for want of Rowing Boats
Make use of Booths to get their Pence & Groats
Here you may see beef roasted on the spit
And for your money you may taste a bit
There you may print your name, tho cannot write
Cause num'd with cold: tis done with great delight
And lay it by that ages yet to come
May see what things upon the ice were done"