Until about 2009, the railway arches between London Bridge and South Bermondsey stations were full of mechanics, cabinet makers, and the kind of light industrial businesses that thrive in cheap, oddly shaped spaces nobody else wants. Then a cheesemonger started brewing beer in one of them.

Evin O’Riordain had been working at Neal’s Yard Dairy in Covent Garden when they sent him to New York to help set up Whole Foods’ cheese counter. His colleagues there took him to d.b.a., a bar on the Lower East Side with a beer list that treated brewing the way Neal’s Yard treated cheesemaking — as craft with terroir, not commodity. He came home, started homebrewing, and in September 2009 signed the lease on a small arch on Druid Street. The Kernel Brewery opened with a pale ale dry-hopped with American varieties and a porter that tasted like the kind of thing London used to make before the big breweries killed the style. It was, by most accounts, the first new brewery in Bermondsey in over a century.

What happened next was fast and not entirely planned. Brew By Numbers arrived in 2012. Anspach & Hobday Kickstarted their way into an arch in 2013, initially with nothing but a porter and a dream. Fourpure followed. Partizan. By 2015, people had started calling it the Bermondsey Beer Mile, and on Saturdays the arches opened their shutters and you could walk from one to the next, drinking thirds and halves at source. The rents were low because the landlord was Network Rail, which had owned London’s railway arches since privatisation and wasn’t especially interested in maximising yield from units that flooded when it rained and had no planning permission for retail use. The Saturday-only taproom model — technically wholesale premises with a bit of on-site tasting — was a licensing workaround that became the Mile’s defining feature.

In 2018, Network Rail sold its entire arch portfolio to Blackstone and Telereal Trillium for £1.5 billion. Rents started climbing. Brew By Numbers left. Fourpure closed in 2024, production shipped to Huddersfield. Some of the arches are now occupied by taprooms that don’t brew on-site at all — Cloudwater’s Bermondsey outpost pours Manchester beer, and Craft Beer Junction is primarily an import operation. The newer arrivals include a meadery, a cidery, and an indoor skatepark with its own beer brand. We are some distance from the original premise.

But the walk itself still works. You start at The Kernel on Spa Road — still Saturday-only, still no-frills, still pouring some of the best pale ale in London — and head west along Enid Street and Druid Street, roughly a mile and a half to the last arch. Thirteen stops on our route, though the actual count fluctuates; places open, places close, someone starts a nano-brewery in a shipping container. You’ll want to eat around the midpoint — Maltby Street Market sits right between stops eight and nine, and the pulled pork there is better than anything the taprooms are serving. Most people don’t finish. That’s fine. The Beer Mile isn’t a challenge crawl. It’s a Saturday afternoon that starts with good intentions and ends when someone orders a fourth round at The Barrel Project and nobody makes it to Hop Kingdom.

The arches are still there. Whether they’ll still be full of breweries in ten years depends on what the new landlords decide to charge for them.