Why you should experience Native Bankside in London, England.
Native Bankside is an industrially expressive aparthotel where Bankside's Shakespearean theater history, mercantile heritage, warehouse architecture and contemporary cultural energy converge within the former Empire Warehouse on Bear Gardens.
Set along Bear Gardens near Park Street and just steps from Shakespeare's Globe, the property occupies a former tea warehouse built in 1903 on a street whose name preserves the brutal entertainment culture once concentrated around Bankside's bear-baiting arenas. Tea merchants Appleton Machin & Smiles occupied Empire Warehouse for much of its working life, while pattern-card makers and tobacconists formed part of the broader commercial population that used the surrounding industrial buildings during the twentieth century. Decades of vacancy followed the decline of those warehouse functions before the surviving brick fabric, arched factory windows and industrial proportions became the architectural foundation for Native's contemporary conversion. The result is a hotel where Empire Warehouse, Appleton Machin & Smiles and the theatrical history of Bear Gardens preserve Bankside's layered evolution from entertainment quarter to trading district and contemporary cultural enclave.
What you should know about Native Bankside.
Native Bankside is best known for opening on August 6, 2018 as Native's flagship London aparthotel, transforming three historic Southwark warehouse buildings through an architectural intervention by SPPARC into a 75-apartment property rising to eight storeys at its highest point. Architect Trevor Morriss and SPPARC worked with Native, Macro Investments and Rainsford Contracts on a scheme combining restoration with new construction, retaining the historic courtyard and a remnant of the medieval street pattern while integrating the former Empire Warehouse into the larger composition. Conran Contracts furnished the 75 studios and one- and two-bedroom apartments, extending the architectural concept through interiors organized around the industrial style of exposed brick, polished concrete and original arched warehouse windows. Native chief executive Guy Nixon positioned the 2018 opening as the first milestone in a wider expansion into major UK cities, with Native Glasgow and Manchester's Ducie Street Warehouse following the Bankside project, while The Telegraph subsequently named Native Bankside Best Aparthotel in London. The convergence of SPPARC, Trevor Morriss, Conran Contracts, Guy Nixon, Macro Investments and Rainsford Contracts established Native Bankside as an unusually authored conversion whose architectural character grew directly from the industrial structure it inherited.
SPPARC made the surviving warehouse fabric central to the architectural narrative, treating the medieval alignment of Bear Gardens and the industrial buildings as generators of the contemporary scheme. IG Masonry Support contributed brick feature arch lintels to the front elevation, allowing new construction to continue the visual rhythm of Empire Warehouse while differentiating the twenty-first-century intervention from the retained historic masonry. Conran Contracts translated that discussion into the apartments through furniture selected for the converted industrial setting, strengthening the relationship between architecture and interior design without obscuring the heavy brickwork and factory-scale openings. Together, Trevor Morriss, SPPARC, Conran Contracts and IG Masonry Support created a contemporary hospitality project whose defining creative material is the accumulated physical character of Bankside itself.
How to fold Native Bankside into your trip.
Native Bankside works as the anchor for an afternoon tracing Elizabethan theater, industrial power and medieval commerce along the Thames.
Begin at Shakespeare's Globe, where American actor and director Sam Wanamaker's decades-long campaign produced a reconstruction of the Globe 230 meters from the original Elizabethan theater, reconnecting Bankside with the Shakespearean performance culture that once flourished around Bear Gardens. Continue to Tate Modern, where Herzog & de Meuron transformed Sir Giles Gilbert Scott's former Bankside Power Station into an international museum of modern and contemporary art, preserving the immense Turbine Hall as the defining spatial memory of the building's industrial purpose. Conclude at Borough Market, whose history reaches medieval Southwark and whose enduring food-trading culture carries the district's commercial character into the present within the railway arches and streets south of London Bridge. The progression moves from Shakespearean performance through Scott and Herzog & de Meuron's successive architectural visions into centuries of metropolitan food commerce, revealing the theatrical, industrial and mercantile histories compressed around Native Bankside.
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