The other South Bank

South London gets an unfair press. You know the sort of thing. Cabbies hurriedly turning off their “for hire” lights and roaring off into the night the moment you ask to be taken south of the Thames. Jokes like: “Why does a North London girl go out with a South London boy? To get her handbag back”. Millwall supporters. Del Boy and Rodney. Catford. Yes, South London, like the past, is another country: they do things differently there.

They do culture a bit differently there, too. North of the Thames is the West End with its theatres; Trafalgar Square with the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery; South Kensington with its vast Victorian museums. In short, the establishment stuff. South of the river, things are a bit edgier.

Let me take you across Waterloo Bridge, leaving the reassuringly antique architecture of Somerset House and the Savoy Hotel behind us. We are now approaching that bastion of 1960s high art, the South Bank complex itself. People call the Royal Festival Hall, the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the Hayward Gallery, the National Film Theatre, the National Theatre itself, ugly. They are wrong. These buildings are not ugly: they are just not beautiful. They recoil from the very categories “beautiful” and “ugly”. They deny that a building needs to be, or even can be, beautiful. It is a shell in which things happen, that’s all.

Now, let’s face it, you’re right: the South Bank is ugly. But on a sunny day it’s a great place to pause for a coffee at a pavement cafe; just make sure you sit facing across the river to get a good view of Somerset House and the Savoy Hotel, that’s all.

We’re not stopping here, anyway. We’re heading east along Upper Ground towards that other great South Bank citadel of culture: Tate Modern. And we’re going to ignore it. Modern it may be, but it’s had so many headlines that it’s old hat now. We want a rarer bird.

So before you reach Tate Modern, nip down Hopton Street to your right and call in at the Purdy Hicks Gallery, housed in a vast old Victorian warehouse. It’s a privately-owned commercial gallery, but they like visitors; and it’s stuffed with some stunning contemporary British and Irish painting and photography. Don’t be shy about taking your time and having a good long look; but if you can’t afford any of the original work on show at least buy a postcard for form’s sake.

Back to Hopton Street; but we’re still ignoring Tate Modern. Instead we’re calling in at the Bankside Gallery, home to the Royal Watercolour Society.

The Society was founded more than two centuries ago, but don’t let that fool you. You won’t find a namby-pamby landscape in the place, and you’ll be astonished at how intense, how dramatic, how provoking, watercolours can be. You can keep your sharks in formaldehyde or your rumpled sheets: watercolours might be half as old as time but the Bankside Gallery proves that it’s the artist that makes the art, not the medium.

While passing Tate Modern protect yourself against its come-hither siren-song by gazing firmly in the opposite direction, across the Millennium Bridge, at the second-best view of St Paul’s there is (the west front looming down Ludgate Hill is still the best), a side elevation that reveals the cathedral as long and lean, like a leopard lying down.

Our next cultural landmark is the reconstructed Globe Theatre, and guess what: we’re ignoring that, too. Instead we’ll visit the site of the Globe’s predecessor, the first theatre ever built in Southwark, just round the corner off New Globe Walk. The Rose went up in 1587, 12 years before the Globe, and premiered new work by playwrights like Kyd, Marlowe, the Bard himself. It went bust around 1603, decayed for a few years, and was pulled down. But its foundations were uncovered during redevelopment in 1989, and were saved thanks to a high-profile campaign by top thesps including the ailing Lord Larry – his last speech was a plea for the Rose’s remains to be preserved. And so they were, as an exhibition and performance space in a specially built basement underneath Rose Court.

We end our foray into darkest South London with a beer at the 18th century Anchor on Bankside: the place is a maze of little rooms and has the best pub patio in London, right on the river. It’s also family-friendly, and if you’ve dragged the kids all this way they’ve earned a fizzy orange and a bag of crisps. There’s so much more I could show you: the replica Golden Hind, far too tiny to sail round the world in; Southwark Cathedral; the Old Operating Theatre at Guy’s, where patients facing pre-anaesthetic surgery could console themselves with the thought that they probably wouldn’t survive it long; the ancient George, London’s last galleried coaching inn. And, of course, Borough Market, too wonderful for words.

Perhaps another time.

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