10 surviving secrets of Shakespeare's London

From bear pits to heads on spikes, the bits of the bard's London that remain

Shakespeare arrived in London around 1590, aged 26, and stayed for almost a quarter of a century at various addresses in the City and Southwark. He found a timbered metropolis of 200,000 people, ravaged by plague, yet outgrowing its medieval walls. What follows is a selection of the sites, spaces and buildings that can be said to have coloured Shakespeare's world and influenced his writing, and which can still be visited today. While we've purposefully omitted from the list of 10 places the reconstructed Globe - indelibly associated with the writer and already well-known throughout the world - we have included a couple of buildings we know Shakespeare visited or saw; sites we can be fairly confident he would have experienced; and modern places that evoke his world in vivid and surprising ways.

1 Bear Gardens, South Bank: A narrow, inconspicuous alleyway just before Southwark Bridge marks the site of one of London's forgotten bear pits. The rickety, timbered amphitheatre loomed over the houses and stews of Bankside from a filthy field dotted with kennels and ponds. Twice a week, up to a thousand people would cram into the timbered amphitheatre to watch bulls and grizzly bears lacerate mastiff dogs, tossing them through the air and crunching their bones; this was Elizabethan London's most popular spectator sport. Shakespeare, who lived nearby in the late 1590s (by the Clink Prison), would have been familiar with the pandemonium; Sackerson, a celebrity bear, appears in The Merry Wives of Windsor and The Winter's Tale has the immortal stage direction 'exit, pursued by a bear'.

Just off Park St, SE1; nearest Tube: London Bridge.

2 The Church of St Magnus the Martyr: This much-ignored church (rebuilt after the Fire) is well worth a visit because it contains a large, vivid and painstakingly detailed model of Old London Bridge, whose northern approach it originally guarded. Though it depicts a colourful 13th-century incarnation of the bridge, most of the bridge's features (except for Becket's chapel and the central drawbridge) would have been familiar to Shakespeare: its 19 arches, foaming starlings, handsome timber-framed houses bulging over the Thames, and the sense that it was one continual, bustling street. We don't know if Shakespeare saw what a Swiss tourist described living on the bridge in 1599: a live camel.

Lower Thames St, EC3R 6DN; nearest Tube: Monument

3 The Southwark Gateway Needle: Each day, hordes of commuters and tourists pass this 80-feet high, tilted stone spike at the southern end of London Bridge. Built in 1999, it has come to represent the point on the old bridge where the heads of traitors were impaled on long wooden spears. To ensure longevity, the heads were parboiled, coated in pitch, and doted upon by the Keeper of the Heads. One of Shakespeare's contemporaries saw 30 heads in 1599, noting the perverse pride noblemen felt at seeing an ancestor's head on a stick; Shakespeare himself may well have seen the heads of former royal favourite Robert Devereux and plotter Guy Fawkes.

South End London Bridge, SE1 9SP; nearest Tube: London Bridge

4 The Theatre, Curtain Road: An unnoticed brown plaque affixed to a Foxtons in Shoreditch marks the site of a theatrical revolution. After the performance of plays in the City's galleried inns was banned, the actor-manager James Burbage and his wealthy father-in-law erected "a gorgeous playing-place in the fields" on this spot in 1576, half a mile to the north of the City walls. It was the first purpose-built, polygonal playhouse in London, home to Shakespeare's acting company for much of the 1590s, and staging some of the bard's earliest plays including perhaps Romeo and Juliet. In 1598, it was dismantled in the dead of night to thwart its avaricious ground landlord and was resurrected the next year as the Globe on Bankside.

86-88 Curtain Road, EC2A 3AA; nearest Tube: Old Street

5 St Paul's Cross: The north-east corner of St Paul's Churchyard was, in Shakespeare's day, the hub of the bookselling trade. The booksellers' stalls had fantastical painted signs - dragons, serpents, lovers, devils - hinting at the drama and romance of what was sold within. Here, customers could buy appallingly inaccurate printed editions of Shakespeare plays, and he could browse the poems and plays of his rivals. Today, an inscription set into the pavement marks the site of Paul's Cross, formerly a low-walled outdoor pulpit with a golden cross from which puritan preachers vented their hatred of the theatre, which they saw as sacrilegious and degenerate, to crowds of up to 3,000.

Paternoster Row, EC4M 8AD; nearest Tube: St Paul's

6 Middle Temple Hall: Hidden amongst the magical gardens, oak trees and whispering fountains of the Middle Temple, this wintry Elizabethan dining hall is the only surviving building in London where Shakespeare's plays were actually performed during his lifetime (Hampton Court Palace was not in London). In 1602, Twelfth Night debuted under its hammer-beam roof with Shakespeare himself, also an actor, performing.

Middle Temple Lane, EC4Y 9AT; nearest Tube: Temple

7 The Dutch Church, Austin Friars: As Othello makes clear, the theme of the alien in society captured Shakespeare's imagination and it's likely - though not proven - he was familiar with this church, the focal point and administrative centre of the Dutch Protestant community (in 1604, he was lodging with a Huguenot refugee in Silver Street). Having fled religious persecution on the Continent, they comprised 7,000 of the foreigners who collectively made up 3.5 per cent of London's population in 1592. Not everyone welcomed them. Elizabeth's spymaster characterised immigrants as "rapists, murderers and thieves" and Sir Walter Raleigh argued that foreigners bled society dry and should no longer be able to scrounge off poverty relief. As such, the Dutch Church was an occasional target of the mob's xenophobic rage. Today, the ill-attended, post-Blitz church still promotes Dutch culture and heritage in multicultural London.

7 Austin Friars, EC2N 2HA; nearest Tube: Liverpool St

8 St John's Gate, Clerkenwell: This imposing structure, marooned among Clerkenwell's warehouses, was built in 1504 to guard the entrance to the priory of the Knights of St John. By Shakespeare's time, following the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII, its ground floor had become the headquarters of the Master of the Revels, who censored plays. All of Shakespeare's plays would have been carefully vetted here, alongside works by other playwrights; it's possible some lost masterpieces were consigned to oblivion within these very walls.

St John's Lane, EC1M 4DA; nearest Tube: Farringdon

9 Convoy's Wharf, Deptford: Though a replica of Sir Francis Drake's Golden Hinde can be found on the South Bank, the remains of the actual ship that circumnavigated the globe are buried beneath Convoys' Wharf in Deptford, once a vast Tudor dockyard, now a windswept industrial zone. After 'the noble pirate' returned triumphant in 1580, his ship was turned into London's first museum, testifying to England's growing maritime might, and possibly influencing the name of The Globe playhouse. The Hinde was a piece of palpable history, and Shakespeare may well have visited. As with the Berlin Wall centuries later, visitors liked to break off chunks as mementoes. A year after Shakespeare's death in 1616, one visitor could find only 'the broken ribs of the ship'.

SE8; nearest rail station: Deptford

10 Playhouse Yard: There is something quietly enchanting about this spot a stone's throw from Blackfriars Bridge. The whole area was once a sprawling monastic complex but after the Dissolution, the Black Friars' former refractory was converted into a private theatre for choir boys - and in 1608, James Burbage opened it as the sister playhouse to the Globe. On this ground, many of Shakespeare's later plays were staged. Shakespeare liked the area. Aged 49, he could afford to buy a gatehouse just around the corner in Ireland Yard (now a mere backstreet). Three years later, he was dead, bequeathing it to his daughter.

By Black Friars Lane, EC4V 5EX; nearest Tube Blackfriars

Historian Dr Matthew Green is the author of the critically acclaimed London: A Travel Guide Through Time. He also runs a six-part evening course on the history of London in Pimlico, beginning on Tuesday September 29, and immersive live tours of historic London every month.