This round, timber-framed, thatched-roof building is Shakespeare's Globe, and it exists here, on this exact stretch of riverbank, because the City of London banned it from existing anywhere else. In the fifteen nineties, City authorities formally outlawed the performance of plays inside their own jurisdiction — so every theatre company in London had to relocate somewhere the City's law didn't reach. Bankside was already London's dumping ground for anything respectable London wouldn't admit to wanting: bear-baiting pits, unlicensed brothels, all of it operating here specifically because nobody official was watching. Shakespeare's company built their theatre in the middle of what proper London considered its red-light district, because that was the only ground left where the law couldn't touch them.
The original burned down in an afternoon. On the twenty-ninth of June, sixteen thirteen, during a performance of Henry the Eighth, a special-effects cannon fired to mark the king's entrance
and its wadding landed on the thatched roof. The whole building was ash inside an hour. Remarkably, only one injury was recorded — a man whose burning trousers he put out by dousing them in a pint of ale, which may be the single most efficient use of beer in English history. They rebuilt it within a year, this time with a tile roof instead of thatch, which tells you exactly what the insurance conv
