Despite the South Bank’s recent renaissance as a place of high culture and leisure, the area has been built upon centuries of open space, criminality and bad reputation. From the Elizabethan Bear-pits to the waste lands of Lambeth Marsh, Chris McCabe’s Real South Bank investigates this notorious and ever-inspiring area of London. Covering the area between Blackfriars Bridge and Vauxhall Bridge, and as far back as Elephant and Castle, the book includes chapters on Shakespeare’s real Globe, a night walk in the footsteps of Dickens and a journey along the lost underground river Neckinger. Drawing on the South Bank’s appeal to past poets McCabe tracks the movements of poets William Blake and Arthur Rimbaud and weaves together his accounts with a new series of poems about the area called ‘Liquid City’. Real South Bank acts as an unflinching guide to this distinctive, often maligned and now extremely popular area of contemporary London.
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