Shad Thames is a picturesque and historic riverside area next to Tower Bridge in Bermondsey.

This is not a place you come for large houses, great gardens or country walks: Shad Thames is defiantly urban, its spaces rich with the history of London's riverside past. This is, like Borough and London Bridge, the historical riverside, a place of walks between spice warehouses.

Of course, for a long time (like other places) Shad Thames was largely forgotten. This is now all in the past, and the areas riverside flats and lovely apartments are interspersed with the kind of bars and restaurants, riverside uber-pubs and achingly cool bars that you'd expect to see in Notting Hill or Holland Park. A particularly important land mark is Hay's Galleria, a glorious updating of an old industrial space and now home to a wealth of bars and restaurants and offering wonderful views. Amongst the excellent apartments are fantastically fashionable work units which allow the design and hi-tech industries to work and play in this extremely fashionable area.

Inland from the waterside, from the extremely plush and sometimes very opulent apartments, there are some streets of little Victorian terraces and some ex-council estates (the remnants of the area's old face), and these streets are being modernized along with those of Bermondsey and Rotherhithe generally.