Southwark Cathedral

The earliest surviving part of this relatively small cathedral is the retrochoir at the eastern end, which contains four chapels and was part of the 13th-century Priory of St Mary Overie (from ‘St Mary over the Water’). However, most of the cathedral is Victorian, including the nave (1897). You enter via the southwest door and immediately to the left is the Marchioness memorial to the 51 people who died when a pleasure cruiser on the Thames hit a dredger and sank near Southwark Bridge in 1989. Walk up the north aisle of the nave and on the left you’ll see the brightly coloured and canopied tomb of John Gower, the 14th-century poet who was the first to write in English. In the north transept you’ll see a memorial tablet to Lionel Lockyer, a quack doctor celebrated for his patent medicines; note its humorous epitaph. On the eastern side of the north transept is the Harvard Chapel, named after John Harvard, founder of the namesake University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who was baptised here in 1607. Cross into the choir to admire the 16th-century Great Screen separating the choir from the retrochoir, a gift of the bishop of Winchester in 1520. On the choir floor below the organ is a tablet marking the tomb of Edmond Shakespeare, actor-brother of the Bard, who died in 1607. In the south aisle of the nave have a look at the green alabaster monument to William Shakespeare with depictions of the original Globe Theatre and Southwark Cathedral; the stained-glass window above shows characters from A Midsummer Night’s Dream,Hamlet and The Tempest. Beside the monument is a plaque to Sam Wanamaker (1919–93), the American film director and actor who was the force behind the rebuilt Globe Theatre.