Roman Southwark was a substantial suburb of Londinium occupying a series of sand and gravel eyots in the marshy southern Thames floodplain, connected to the main city by a timber bridge near the line of the modern London Bridge. Established in the AD 50s and occupied through to the early 5th century, it served as the southern gateway to Londinium where Watling Street and Stane Street converged before crossing the river, and contained a dense mix of strip-buildings, warehouses, workshops, mansiones, temples, cemeteries and at least one elite residence.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
Southwark was functionally part of Londinium rather than a separate settlement, controlling the bridgehead and a major road junction, and likely housed travellers, traders and craftsmen serving traffic into the provincial capital. The discovery of the "Londoniensium" tablet (a writing tablet referring to "Londoners") and a marble inscription mentioning a provincial governor's residence have raised the possibility that part of the imperial administration was based here.
Decades of developer-led excavation, particularly at Borough High Street, Tabard Square, Winchester Palace and the Courage Brewery site, have revealed waterfront revetments, warehouses, the temple complex at Tabard Square (with its inscribed dedication to Mars Camulus by a Gaulish merchant), a probable mansio, bath-houses, and the Winchester Palace structure with painted wall plaster and a mar
Roman Southwark was a substantial suburb of Londinium occupying a series of sand and gravel eyots in the marshy southern Thames floodplain, connected to the main city by a timber bridge near the line of the modern London Bridge. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a settlement site from the Roman period in Britain.
Southwark is classified as a Roman settlement — a civilian site in the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer. Roman Britain's archaeology encompasses thousands of sites ranging from legionary fortresses and marching camps to villas, temples and towns.
Several Roman sites lie within a short distance, including Romano-British bath house and medieval remains at 11-15 Borough High Street (0.2 km), Roman riverboat, 136m west of Greenwood Theatre (0.3 km), Tabard Square Temple Complex (0.4 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
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