Shakespeare's Globe

Built in 1599 by a carpenter named Peter Street using timber salvaged from The Theatre in Shoreditch, the original Globe held up to 3,000 people. The beams came from an earlier playhouse whose landlord had refused to renew the lease, forcing the Lord Chamberlain's Men (Shakespeare's acting company) to dismantle it in secret over the winter of 1598 and carry everything south across the Thames. Over the following decade, the Globe hosted the first performances of Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth.

On 29 June 1613, a stage cannon misfired during a performance of Henry VIII and set the thatched roof alight. The building burned down in under two hours. One eyewitness records a man whose breeches caught fire and were doused with ale; there were no other casualties. A second Globe, this time roofed with tiles, opened on the same site in 1614 and operated until 1642, when the Puritan-controlled Parliament closed all the London playhouses.

American actor-director Sam Wanamaker visited London in 1949 looking for a monument to Shakespeare on Bankside, and found a brewery wall with a small plaque. He began a public campaign in the 1960s and formally founded the Shakespeare Globe Trust in 1970. The project faced decades of planning difficulties and funding shortfalls before construction finally began on the Bankside site.

Wanamaker died of lung cancer on 18 December 1993, aged 74, having been awarded an honorary CBE for the work earlier that year. Construction continued under his colleagues. The theatre opened on 12 June 1997, with Mark Rylance, the Globe's first artistic director, performing in Henry V. Its thatched roof makes it the only such building permitted within central London since the Great Fire of 1666.

The indoor Sam Wanamaker Playhouse opened on 15 January 2014 with a production of The Duchess of Malfi. Its candlelit auditorium recreates the kind of roofed, indoor Jacobean playhouse in which Shakespeare's company performed during the winter months when the outdoor Globe was too cold.