A new Wetherspoon pub, The Sun Wharf, is due to open on 16 September 2025 in one of London’s most frequented transport hubs, occupying 48–50 Tooley Street beside the entrance to London Bridge station. According to the company, the site makes use of the distinctive brick railway arches that have long marked this stretch of the riverside, and the chain says the venue will welcome its first customers on that date.

Images released by the operator and reported in the press show an interior that leans into the building’s industrial past: exposed brick arches, framed portraits on the walls and a distinctive swirled carpet that the company says complements the venue’s historic fabric. The company’s published material about the new pub highlights the visual nods to the site’s previous uses while describing the fit-out as aiming to balance heritage and contemporary pub design.

The arches themselves carry layers of commercial history. Before becoming the site of a visitor attraction, they were occupied by importers and provision agents who served the busy riverside warehouses. Much of the immediate area was reworked in the 1980s during the No.1 London Bridge development, when Fenning’s Wharf and Sun Wharf were removed; archaeological work linked to that redevelopment uncovered prehistoric features, including Bronze Age burials, underscoring how many centuries of activity lie beneath modern London.

That later visitor attraction was the London Dungeon, which first opened on Tooley Street in 1974 as a waxwork-style exhibition of grim episodes from the capital’s past. The Dungeon’s official site and contemporary accounts record that the Tooley Street location closed in January 2013; the attraction subsequently relocated to County Hall on the South Bank and was reconfigured into a more theatrical, actor-led experience alongside other Merlin Entertainments properties.

The Sun Wharf opening forms part of a broader pattern along the Thames of adapting former warehouse and wharf buildings for leisure and retail. Nearby Hay’s Wharf, for example, was conserved and redeveloped into Hay’s Galleria during the same era of riverside renewal: what had been a major produce depot was remodelled into a mixed-use arcade beneath a glass roof, preserving facades and adding public art and commercial space as part of regeneration efforts.

Wetherspoon’s own history pages and the pub’s information sheet set out the address, the opening date and the links to the site’s past, framing the new pub as both a convenient stop for commuters and a venue that offers a tangible connection to local history. The company’s materials emphasise the continuity of use along Tooley Street even as the functions of the buildings have shifted dramatically over the decades.

For visitors who choose to drink where others worked, fought and were buried centuries earlier, The Sun Wharf will be another chapter in a long story of reinvention on the Thames’s north bank — a place where archaeological records testify to prehistoric activity and modern leisure amenity sits atop layers of the city’s industrial and social past.

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Source: Noah Wire Services