The Anchor, Bankside: Shakespeare's Haunted Waterfront

The Anchor at Bankside, dating back to at least 1615, stands as a remarkable survivor of four centuries of London’s turbulent history, a contemporary of Shakespeare himself and a witness to events that shaped the city’s soul. Located on the South Bank of the Thames, in the shadow of the Tate Modern and steps from the reconstructed Globe Theatre, the pub’s position on the working waterfront meant it served a remarkably diverse clientele – watermen, dockworkers, sailors, prostitutes, and actors – a rough and often violent group whose lives were frequently short and unforgettable. This history has left a spectral imprint upon the building, a collection of apparitions that continue to this day.

A figure appears in the upstairs rooms of The Anchor, consistently dressed in Elizabethan period attire: doublet and hose, ruff collar, the costume of Shakespeare’s time. He seems to be rehearsing lines, gesturing and speaking silently as if preparing for a performance that ended four centuries ago. Some believe he was an actor from the Globe or the Rose who frequented The Anchor between performances. Perhaps he died here, or perhaps he simply loved the place so much he couldn’t leave, even in death. His gestures are broad and theatrical in the Elizabethan style, and sometimes he appears to hear an invisible audience’s response, pausing before continuing, lost in an eternal rehearsal.

Accompanying this solitary performer is the occasional sound of celebration rising from empty rooms: period music and laughter, the clink of pewter tankards, voices speaking in archaic English with Shakespearean phrases and bawdy jokes. A raucous Elizabethan gathering, still drinking, still celebrating, in rooms that have been empty for hours. Furthermore, a woman appears in doorways wearing a plague doctor’s mask, the distinctive bird-beak shape that was once filled with protective herbs. She manifests briefly and vanishes before anyone can react, a vision of epidemic terror. Plague hit Southwark with devastating force in 1603, 1625, and 1665, with smaller outbreaks between. The crowded, poor districts suffered most as bodies piled in streets and plague pits overflowed. Female plague doctors were rare but not unknown, and she may have been a healer or nurse who treated the dying here. Or perhaps the mask represents something else entirely: death personified, walking the pub’s halls. Some witnesses feel her appearance carries a warning, a reminder of mortality and how quickly death came to the entertainment district. She walks through doorways as plague walked through houses, taking whom it chose.

The Great Fire of London started in Pudding Lane, swept through the City, then jumped the river. Southwark burned too, though less completely, and The Anchor survived or was rebuilt in the aftermath. The phantom residue of those fires lingers in the building. The smell of smoke fills rooms without source, the acrid scent of burning wood, cloth, and lives, overwhelming witnesses suddenly before fading away. The sounds of flight sometimes fill the building: running feet, screaming voices, the chaos of evacuation. Thousands fled and many died, and their terror persists in the survivor building. An orange glow is occasionally reflected in windows when no fire burns outside, the light of the Great Fire still visible somehow, the past bleeding through into the present.

The cellars beneath The Anchor are ancient, predating much of the current building. Stone-vaulted and extensive, they connect through forgotten passages to other riverside buildings, forming a network of underground spaces where smugglers and criminals once conducted their business. Dark shapes move through these passages, glimpsed from the corner of the eye but gone when looked at directly, trailing a sense of presence and the feeling of being accompanied by something that does not want to be seen. Watermen who worked the Thames, ferrying passengers across the river before the bridges multiplied, stored goods in these cellars and perhaps bodies too. The river trade was rough, and men died and disappeared with regularity. The temperature drops suddenly in certain cellar areas, intense and localized cold that defies explanation. These cold spots sometimes move, as if something walks through the underground dark trailing cold behind it. The sound of water lapping and boats bumping against docks reaches listeners in the cellars, though the modern embankment long since changed the riverside configuration. The old Thames still laps at phantom shores.

Visitors to The Anchor enter a space where four centuries of lives have accumulated. The actors who played on the nearby stages, the watermen who ferried Londoners across the Thames, the workers who loaded and unloaded the riverside wharves—all have left their marks. Some have left themselves, unable or unwilling to depart a place that shaped their lives and witnessed their deaths. The performance continues at The Anchor. The stage lights never fully dim. The audience never quite leaves. The show goes on forever.

The Anchor’s documented history begins in 1615, during the reign of James I, when Shakespeare was still writing and the Globe Theatre stood nearby. Bankside was London’s entertainment district, a lawless stretch of the South Bank that lay outside City jurisdiction in the Bishop of Winchester’s liberty. Everything forbidden in London flourished here without interference: theatres deemed too rowdy for respectable society, bear-baiting pits, and brothels all clustered together in Southwark’s sin district. The pub’s clientele reflected this rough world. Actors from the Globe and Rose theatres drank alongside watermen who worked the Thames, dockworkers loading and unloading cargo, prostitutes known as Winchester Geese, sailors between voyages, and bear-baiters with their audiences. It was a place of drinking, fighting, and dying, and The Anchor served through it all. The Great Fire of 1666 swept through Southwark too, and The Anchor was rebuilt and survived. Plague took regular tolls, closing the theatres during epidemics only for them to reopen and close again. Through centuries of catastrophe, the pub watched time pass and accumulated the spectral residue of countless lives lived hard and ended abruptly. The Anchor is a haunted monument to Bankside’s wild past, where the theatre of life and death played out for centuries, and where the performers have never taken their final bow.

Sources: Bankside historical records, Southwark local archives, Globe Theatre historical documentation, Great Fire of London records, Paranormal investigation reports, Staff testimonials, Visitor experience accounts, Thames watermen historical society.

Sources

• Wikipedia search: “The Anchor, Bankside: Shakespeare”
• Historic England — Listed Buildings — Register of historic sites