‘Millwall FC is another part of Bermondsey’s history that will, as of this week, get to remain in place while the neighbourhood is repackaged around it.’
“The club has been awarded a 999-year lease on the Den and its surrounds, bringing down the curtain on a fraught few years. Bermondsey has always been a fluid, ever-changing kind of place, shoved up into a bend of the Thames, surrounded on all sides but also oddly isolated. For hundreds of years that whole strip of land south of the city was an interlude of leisure and licentiousness. In his biography of London Peter Ackroyd mentions ‘bear pits, stew-houses and pleasure gardens’, plus a flourishing grassroots industry of cutpurses and dandy highwaymen, a place where ‘flashy women come out to take leave of thieves at dusk and wish them luck’. …”
Guardian