Pilgrims progress: a pint and a turkey sandwich before you go?

IT IS 400 years since the Pilgrim Fathers cast off for the New World from a riverside wharf east of King’s Stairs in the parish of St Mary the Virgin. Mind you, if they’d had a crystal ball to show them this week’s headlines from Washington, they might have opted to stay in Rotherhithe.

The knife-edge results in the Trump-Biden race once more exposed the wider deep divisions within the modern world: rich v. poor, populists v. liberals, north v. south London.

The departing protestant Separatists would be familiar enough with that. They were fleeing discrimination from the established church, an institution that in the 17th century was very much of the “if you don’t like it here, why don’t you leave?” persuasion.

They didn’t have any real connection with south-of-the-river Rotherhithe, although the skipper of their vessel, the Mayflower, was a local. It was a bit like modern venturers setting out for the unknown and choosing to leave from Gatwick.

That hasn’t stopped Rotherhithe milking the connection to attract visiting Americans, at least as far as the local Mayflower pub. There were none of them around as I walked past today.

The pub was originally the Shippe Inn and then the Spread Eagle and Crown until its final renaming in 1956 as the brewers sought to cash in on the Mayflower connection.

They make a big deal about being the only British pub licensed to sell US stamps, a boast that was more impressive in the days when people still posted letters to each other.

Captain Christopher Jones picked up 65 passengers at Rotherhithe in July 1620 and, with a layover in Plymouth, they reached America in November. A year later they were well enough set up to enjoy their first Thanksgiving turkey dinner, or it could have been venison, courtesy of the local Wampanoag tribe.

There were big plans in Rotherhithe to figuratively push the boat out for this year’s 400th anniversary. The local Southwark Council and its partners put up £140,000 towards various community and arts projects. And you can bet turkey would have been on the menu at the Mayflower.

Many of the festivities, like so much else these days, have been shelved because of the Covid crisis. That would probably have suited the Pilgrim Fathers just fine. They weren’t really party people.

But there are plenty of other things to see in this rather charming corner of south east London. There’s St Mary’s Church in the grounds of which Captain Jones is buried. And opposite is an old granary that houses the Sands Studio and film club. A six-hour version of Little Dorrit was once filmed there, in one the corners of London we might still describe as Dickensian.

A few yards away is the engine house of the Thames tunnel built by Sir Marc Isambard Brunel, the first below-river tunnel anywhere in the world when it opened in 1843. The tsar had already turned down his plan for a tunnel under the River Neva. His son, Isambard Kingdom Brunel also worked on the Rotherhithe project.

It was originally a pedestrian link to Wapping on the opposite bank and rapidly became a hangout for pedlars, thieves and prostitutes. Then the railway came, and it’s still used as part of what used to be called the tube’s East London Line.

The engine house is a museum now, shut again for the duration. In normal times you can take a staircase down almost to the tunnel entrance and listen to the trains rumble by. I remember the days before refurbishment when the tube tunnel leading under the river still leaked like a sieve.

Another favourite, a few hundred yards west along the river, is the ruin of Edward III’s 14th century lodge, not much more than the foundations excavated in the 1980s. A preservation order means the open space has not been turned into yet another bland block of flats by the developers.

I won’t go on. You haven’t got all day. But you might want to go and check out the area’s Scandinavian connections – all those Nordic seafarers arriving over the centuries There’s even a Finnish church with its own sauna. Churchgoers are said to be full of stories about the sauna’s miraculous effects, so onward pilgrims!