Mike Redwood
Columnist
International Leather Maker
It is a warm sunny evening in Bermondsey, a suburb of London close to the River Thames, and we are relaxing in a restaurant which originated as a brewhouse set up when Alexander Hay bought the land beside the Thames in London in 1651.
Brewing and tanning were both massive industries in Bermondsey and like tanning, beer required a lot of water, only with beer more was actually consumed, rather than borrowed and returned it. Nevertheless, both industries pushed a lot of oxygen demanding wastewater back out into the tidal Thames.
Consequently, around the world, many towns such as Milwaukee WI, Newark NJ and Leeds England had beer and leather collocated downwind and downstream to share their odours, transport links and water. Like the Swamp in New York (between Brooklyn Bridge and Wall Street), Bermondsey was first the place where butchers were allowed to deposit their hides, so it soon made sense for tanners to use the location to make leather with them. As well as having hides and water, Bermondsey was on the edge of a great southern forest will plenty of oak bark tanning material.
These two interconnected industries defined Bermondsey for centuries. Tanning there produced about one-third of all leather in Britain by the mid-19th century, but brewing was still very much a key part of the area’s identity.
Company of Glovers
I was visiting with a party of Glovers, from the Worshipful Company of Glovers, who are represented but only marginally represented in the area. This is a place for bark more than alum, even when tanning sheep and goat. The industry began with the local oak bark tanning local cattle hides.
Glovers worked with sheep, goat and deer in the main and most tanned their own leather using a mix of alum, salt, flour and egg yolk. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, sumac was introduced from Iberia and became widely used for hunting gauntlets and the like, as well as jackets and purses. But regardless, most glovemakers from Yeovil, Worcester, Oxford or elsewhere, using alum, sumac or both, preferred to tan their own leather unless they could gain access to expensive imported finished leather from countries such as Spain and France where the skins were better suited to gloving.
After the Industrial Revolution, as our excellent guides explained, things changed. Increasing requirements for all types of leather for industry, military and everyday purposes expanded demand beyond the UK kill, so hides and skins had to be imported. Mostly these came from the British Colonies although some material was also to be found in China and South America. A company called Bevington began a major sheepskin tannery, but mostly doing vegetable tanning and taking advantage of the new splitting machines to level down thicker skins or split them to produce a skiver grain for vegetable tanned table-top leathers, hat bands, bookbinding and the like and a lower split for cod oil tanned chamois leather.
Before the Industrial Revolution, most oak bark for tanning had been coppiced in plantations but rising leather demand because of war, population growth, urbanisation and expanding industry had raised demand for leather for harness, military gear, footwear, belting and machinery, so the available supply of oak bark also did not suffice.
Oak woods were also wanted for shipbuilding, construction and charcoal or fuel; where oak standards (a few trees were not coppiced and allowed to grow as a capital crop over 100 years) were harvested for timber, bark might be sold but shifts in woodland management and competing markets constrained how much could be peeled for tanning. Many coppice plantations were replaced with more profitable cereal crops.
Sir Humphry Davy
This is where the leather chemist Humphry Davy stepped into the leather picture, studying leather making and winning the Copley Prize – the 19th century Nobel prize – and in doing so, he instigated the trajectory that approached “oak‑bark tannin” as a chemical substance whose origin, composition and behaviour can be experimentally investigated, rather than treated as a traditional craft material.
With new materials sent from overseas by Joseph Banks, he showed tanners how to uncover and measure tannin content in a wide range of alternate sources. So as the early decades of the 19th century unfolded, Bermondsey became the UK battleground between historic legal and Guild (Livery) control, allowing only domestic oak bark for many products and deciding what processes both chemical and mechanical, such as splitting, could be done by tanners or by curriers. By 1830, we were told, matters had begun to settle and the many fragmented bits of the industry – tanner, currier, leathergoods producers – could come together to form the great leather companies that we saw at the end of the 19th century. The well-known Barrow, Hepburn and Gale (BHG and BarrowHepburn later) was typical going through a merger with product makers Ross along the way.
The company history shows Ross did make mitts and heavy gloves, so almost certainly while Bermondsey became a maze of hide sellers, fellmongers, tanners, leather-dressers, Morocco leather dressers, leather sellers and cutters, curriers, parchment-makers, wool-staplers, horsehair manufacturers, hair and flock manufacturers, patent hair-felt manufacturers plus specialist leather-dyers, and glue-makers in other parts of the vicinity, it did have some industrial glove production at least.
Morocco leather
The huge Morocco leather trade was certainly not overlooked and multistorey warehouses with pulleys for delivery to different levels remain highly visible today albeit for alternate uses. Moroccan leather became important in the UK and a complete process is described in the very first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1771), having been presented as a prize-winning lecture to the Royal Society of Arts. This process was one from the Eastern Mediterranean, tanning with oak galls and used to explain how natural dyes could give the vegetable tanned leather brilliant yellow and red colours that were long lasting. Morocco leather was much used for bookbinding and for light weight footwear.
Being right on the River Thames, Bermondsey was a target for bombers in the Second World War and easily found when the moonlight reflected off the river. Extensive damage was done and most of the tanning capacity moved out to other port cities such as Hull and Liverpool or towns with good canal or river links such as Warrington and Leeds.
But even that was to be short lived. As I was studying Leather Science at Leeds University in the 1960s, rural workers in South Korea and Taiwan were leaving the land and moving to factories working with leather, making shoes, gloves and garments for western markets. When I joined the industry fully in the 1970s, American tanners I met were complaining that the banks they had funded in the past were offering low-cost loans to aid new tanneries in those countries. The relentless process of deindustrialisation had begun for tanneries and the wider leather trades in the old industrial countries.
Now all that remains of leather in Bermondsey are the buildings. But it is an immense and distinct built environment of buildings with so many names and signs reminding the visitor of times past. Full of character, they are well worth preservation. Many would be perfect for leathergoods craft work today.
The brewing industry still exists in the “Bermondsey Beer Mile” which is a cluster of microbreweries and taprooms in and around the arches of the railway viaduct heading into London Bridge and Cannon Street. It is highly probable that some or most of these are the exact arches Bevington used for sealskins and other storage when the railway line was built across their Tanyard many years before.
mike@internationalleathermaker.com
You can find Dr Mike Redwood across social media at @michaelredwood.
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