Bear Gardens

If you were visiting The Globe Theatre, chances are you'd pass this development on the corner of Park Street and New Globe Walk. The developer, the rather grandly named The Governors & Trustees of St Marylebone School  is planning 25 resi units, 250 sq m office and 500 sq m retail on this prime site. They're calling it The Bear Pit, odd name, odd history.

Dig into the area's past and two names keep cropping up, Edward Alleyn and Philip Henslowe, along with two of the most popular pastimes of the Elizabethan era, the theatre and bear-baiting. 

Edward Alleyn was an actor and in 1594 he bought half of the site, then known as Bear Gardens for the not inconsiderable sum of £200, financially he was doing ok. A couple of years later Henslowe acquired a lease on the rest of the site. The two men went into business together, connected by land as well as marriage, Alleyn having married Henslowe's stepdaughter in 1592.

The Elizabethans loved bear-baiting, when they ran out of bears they'd use bulls instead and on one occasion a pony...with an ape strapped to its back. These were not enlightened times. However, bear-baiting was good business and Alleyn and Henslowe were good businessmen.

In an audacious attempt to control the whole baiting racket south of the river the two tried to get appointed as Masters of the Royal Game of Bulls and Bears after the previous incumbent Ralph Bowes died. They failed to get the top jobs but managed to get appointed as deputies instead, now they could start to develop their property.

In 1613 the baiting pit was demolished and for the sum of £360, carpenter Gilbert Katherens was contracted to build a new theatre on the site to be named The Hope. The decision to build was in no small part influenced by the fact that the Globe theatre next door had (some say conveniently) burnt down a couple of months previously on the 29th of June.

The fact that Alleyn and Henslowe had built a theatre did not mean that their bear-baiting days were over, far from it. As I've said these were not enlightened times, if you were to look at the Hope's weekly programme from 1614 it would read: Tues-Sun, Some Plays; Monday, Bear-Baiting. Theatre at the time was part performance space, part zoo, part slaughterhouse and Tuesdays, after Monday afternoon's carnage, must have been, at least for the actors, a deeply unpleasant experience.

This was to be the last major financial venture that either men embarked on. Henslowe died in 1616, four months before Shakespeare, two years after the Hope's first performance. As for Allen, he outlived his partner by 7 years, shuffling off this mortal coil on Christmas Day, 1623.

Today nothing remains of the baiting pits or The Hope or indeed The Globe. But carry on down Park Street, past the Bear Pit development, and you'll come across this curious door at the bottom of the Rose Court office building: