London Leather, Hide & Wool Exchange

The building before you is the former London Leather, Hide and Wool Exchange, completed in eighteen seventy-eight. It stands as a grand reminder of when Bermondsey was the beating heart of the nation’s leather industry. During the nineteenth century, the neighborhood was known as the land of leather, and this exchange functioned as the central marketplace where merchants traded skins on a massive scale. Its architecture was intentionally designed to impress, featuring a prominent entrance flanked by two carved stone figures of Atlas. These statues were meant to symbolize the physical strength of the tanners and laborers who sustained the local economy.