Blood and Playhouses: London's Disreputable Entertainments in 1641
Claes Jansz. Visscher, View of London, 1616. 1 view on 4 sheets, sheet 4, 59 x 80 cm., in the digital collection UM Clark Library Maps. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/clark1ic/x-003020531/39015091198336_04. University of Michigan Library Digital Collections. Accessed August 16, 2026.
Detil: Men walking a dog near the Bear Garden across from The Globe Theatre.
If you wanted to lose an afternoon — and possibly a wager, and occasionally a finger — in the London of 1641, you crossed the river to Bankside.
The south bank of the Thames, in Southwark, was the city's disreputable playground, deliberately outside the jurisdiction of the po-faced authorities who ran the City proper. And so it filled up with everything the City frowned on: the playhouses, the taverns, the brothels (politely called "stews"), and the bear gardens.
The bear gardens are the ones that stop a modern reader cold. They were exactly what they sound like — great open rings where a chained bear was set upon by mastiffs, for the roaring entertainment of a paying crowd that included, on occasion, the King himself. The most famous bears were celebrities of a sort, with names the crowd knew. It is genuinely grim, and it was genuinely beloved, and both of those things being true at once tells you something honest about the period.
High art and blood sport, sharing a postcode
What I find fascinating is that the same corner of London held the bear gardens and the great theatres. The Globe, the Rose, the Hope — the Hope doubled as a bear-baiting ring on the days it wasn't staging plays. High art and blood sport, Shakespeare and Sackerson, sharing a postcode and often a building.
Nor was Bankside the only home of the drama. North of the river, the playhouses my own painters might plausibly have known were still standing in 1641: The Fortune in Clerkenwell's neighbour Cripplegate, and The Red Bull in Clerkenwell itself, both raucous, popular, working-class houses a world away from the courtly refinement Van Dyck painted. The Red Bull in particular had a reputation for loud, boisterous audiences and broad, crowd-pleasing fare — exactly the kind of place a struggling painter might go to forget his debts for an afternoon.
It would not last. In September 1642, as the country tipped into civil war, Parliament ordered the theatres closed. The playhouses that had roared for half a century fell silent, and many never reopened. My novel is set in the final months before that silence — the last winter of the old, loud, disreputable London.
A Clerkenwell footnote, slightly after my time
I should be honest, because a sharp-eyed reader will catch me otherwise. Clerkenwell had its own notorious bear-and-bull-baiting ground — Hockley-in-the-Hole — but its real heyday came a little after my novel: it roared loudest in the decades around 1700, a byword for low sport and lower company. My painters, in 1641, were a generation too early for it.
I mention it anyway, because it belongs to the character of the place I write about and was located in the valley of the RIver Fleet. Clerkenwell was, and would remain, a district on the edge — just outside the rules, hospitable to the things the respectable city preferred to keep at arm's length. Hockley-in-the-Hole is what that edge would become. It's the same appetite, a few decades on.
The part that fascinates me
I keep a private rule when I'm building this world: never sand off the parts that make a modern reader wince. It would be easy to write a tasteful seventeenth century — all candlelight and lovely fabrics — but it would be a lie, and, worse, it would be boring. The bear gardens stay in the mental map of my London precisely because they're uncomfortable.
My characters live in a world that is beautiful and cruel in the same breath — a city that would stage a tragedy and a bear-baiting in the same building, and see no contradiction. If I flinched from the cruelty, the beauty wouldn't mean anything.
If you are interested in learning more about bear baiting and the early modern period, visit https://boxofficebears.com/
