Shakespeare's Globe Theatre

The building you're looking at is a reconstruction. But the story of the original is wild. In fifteen ninety-nine, Shakespeare's acting company had a problem. Their lease on a theatre in Shoreditch — literally called The Theatre — had expired, and the landlord was being difficult. So they waited for a winter night, dismantled the entire building timber by timber, carried the wood across the frozen Thames, and rebuilt it here in Southwark as the Globe. They basically stole their own theatre.

It lasted fourteen years. On the twenty-ninth of June, sixteen thirteen, during a performance of Henry the Eighth, a theatrical cannon misfired and a spark landed on the thatched roof. The whole place burned to the ground in under two hours. Contemporary accounts mention that one man's breeches caught fire and had to be extinguished with a bottle of ale. That's the only recorded injury. The audience got out. The trousers were saved by beer.

The modern reconstruction you see now was the obsession of American actor Sam Wanamaker. He first visited London in nineteen forty-nine, was horrified to find nothing marking the Globe's site but a dirty plaque on a brewery wall, and spent the next thirty years fighting to rebuild it. He died in nineteen ninety-three, four years before it opened in nineteen ninety-seven. He never saw it finished.

The reconstruction uses no structural steel. It's built entirely of English oak with mortise and tenon joints, making it arguably one of the most authentically constructed sixteenth-century buildings in existence — except it was built in the nineteen nineties. The thatched roof is the first new thatch permitted in London since the Great Fire of sixteen sixty-six.