New London Architecture Walking Tour – Bankside

Walk from Southwark station to London Bridge - weaving through once forgotten back streets to bustling pedestrian thoroughfares - to explore and understand Bankside's regeneration, including such game-changing projects as the Millennium Bridge, Tate Modern and the Shard.

Sitting just south-of-the-river, Bankside has found its new identity in large-scale public and private projects dating from the Millennium. TfL have just saved Jubilee Line Southwark station with a new design by MJP Architects featuring a light-filled rotunda. Opposite Will Alsop’s cantilevered Palestra building leads the walk into the Low Line – a maze of brick-lined railway viaducts overhead and alleys below, about to receive further Southwark funding to develop more shops, cafés and theatre spaces.

Developers are re-thinking the area as private investment has opened a new 14-storey luxury residential/educational pavilion named Music Box, by Spaarc Architecture, that sits side by side with the railway. Similar smaller-scale new infills in these old streets like DolbenGroup’s Greenhouse and hillside-like vertical residential terraces of Bear Lane by Panter Hudspith complement surrounding 19thcentury warehouses and light industrial buildings.

The elegant Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners designed Neo Bankside is a residential pavilion pointing the way to Tate Modern by Herzog de Meuron via its Blavatnik Building extension. The three-part Bankside Mix on Southwark Street sits opposite the architect Allies and Morrison’s own offices and indicate the practice’s prominent master-planner role in Bankside’s revival.

To the east, Renzo Piano’s the Shard looms over Union Street’s residual Dickensian character, while new office infills by AHMM and Alan Camp Architects below busy railway tracks exploit every last meter. Borough Market’s new Viaduct, deisgned by Jestico Whiles, and Ted Cullinan’s revival of a medieval palace ruin refresh Bankside’s 21st century coming of age.

The walk starts at Southwark Station on street level, and ends near London Bridge Station.