Old and New Horrors
A 1542 map of Southwark shows only three or four features on Tooley Street, although it is not given a name on this. One of them is a pillory, set up for punishing fraudulent traders. Next to it is a "cage". This was a place to keep drunken disorderly people who were arrested too late in the day to be imprisoned. They would sleep in the cage until sober. The site of those medieval punishments is occupied, quite appropriately, by London Dungeon, a popular tourist attraction. It opened in 1975 and is similar to the "Chamber of Horrors" in Madame Tussaud's Museum (it is owned by Merlin Entertainments). The next building is "Britain at War", another tourist attraction, a recreation of the Blitz. More poignantly in nearby, Stainer Street, off Tooley Street running under the mainline station, there is a 'Blue Plaque' commemorating the 68 people who were killed in the 1941 bombing raid. Popular legend says that there was so much rubble that bodies were simply left behind, and re-buried in the masonry under London Bridge Station. Another museum and tourist attraction has been created under the Bridge at number 2- 4 called 'The London Bridge Experience and London Tombs', the first part of the display is an exhibition of the history of the Bridge and the other part is more of a popular entertainment similar to the 'Dungeon'.
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Famous quotes containing the words old and and/or horrors:
“We who are old, old and gay,
O so old!
Thousands of years, thousands of years,
If all were told:”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)