Sards Rents.. my family used to live there! They were the Pooleys and the Dillons and there were lots of them.

I was intrigued by this story so I've done some research here in London, if you could pass on to the people on the Sards page in Australia that'd be great. Sards Rents was indeed in Bermondsey. more specifically an area called Horsleydown. If you look on a map www.streetmap.co.uk, the now Dickens Estate between George Row and Bermondsey Wall was roughly where Sards Rents used to be. The street ran to "Horsleydown Stairs"... stairs were literally steps down from the road into the Thames that gave access to the river and the flats at low tide. If you look along the map you can see lots of other names of "stairs" still there today.

You have to remember what the Thames was like in those days... ships from all over the world mooring into the docks and trade flowed into Bermondsey, the larder of London... they would have needed a lot of rope!!! If you've ever read Dickens' Oliver Twist it'll give you a picture of what life was like here... he based those final scenes in the slum tenements around Horselydown stairs and that's why today it's called the Dickens Housing Estate, rebuilt after WW2 and all the bomb damage.

The rope was made in the alley that lead down to the stairs.. straight past Sards Rents.

There were many benefactors/employers who built accommodation for their workers like the Sards. They were Neckinger (Neckinger Mill), Guinness (now the Guinness Trust) and Peak (the Peak Freanes biscuit factory where my old Nan used to work!!!))

Thanks to Stella Wilson for the above info.