10 surviving secrets of Shakespeare's London

From bear pits to heads on spikes, the bits of the bard's London that remain

Shakespeare arrived in London around 1590, aged 26, and stayed for almost a quarter of a century at various addresses in the City and Southwark. He found a timbered metropolis of 200,000 people, ravaged by plague, yet outgrowing its medieval walls. What follows is a selection of the sites, spaces and buildings that can be said to have coloured Shakespeare's world and influenced his writing, and which can still be visited today. While we've purposefully omitted from the list of 10 places the reconstructed Globe - indelibly associated with the writer and already well-known throughout the world - we have included a couple of buildings we know Shakespeare visited or saw; sites we can be fairly confident he would have experienced; and modern places that evoke his world in vivid and surprising ways.

1 Bear Gardens, South Bank: A narrow, inconspicuous alleyway just before Southwark Bridge marks the site of one of London's forgotten bear pits. The rickety, timbered amphitheatre loomed over the houses and stews of Bankside from a filthy field dotted with kennels and ponds. Twice a week, up to a thousand people would cram into the timbered amphitheatre to watch bulls and grizzly bears lacerate mastiff dogs, tossing them through the air and crunching their bones; this was Elizabethan London's most popular spectator sport. Shakespeare, who lived nearby in the late 1590s (by the Clink Prison), would have been familiar with the pandemonium; Sackerson, a celebrity bear, appears in The Merry Wives of Windsor and The Winter's Tale has the immortal stage direction 'exit, pursued by a bear'.