It's not what you'd expect to find on a street corner in Bermondsey (specifically the corner of Page's Walk and Mandela Way, SE1).
This is the Bermondsey Panzer, a German tank captured in Belgium in 1945 and rediscovered 30 years later in a scrapheap at the back of a railway goodsyard. The Bricklayers ArmsGoods Depot was established in the 1850s on the site of one of London's first passenger rail termini. By the time of the Second World War it had become a locomotive repair shop, but the postwar shift from steam to diesel saw it become surplus to requirements and the complex was eventually sold to developers, complete with unintentional armoured vehicle.
Much of the site became housing but the western end, closest to Page's Walk, became the Mandela Way trading estate. This Panzer IV tank was discovered underneath a heavy tarpaulin behind the turntable amid what's now the Royal Mail Southwark & Rotherhithe Delivery Office. How it got here has never satisfactorily been explained but historian Dan Cruickshank thinks it may have been captured during the Ardennes Counteroffensive and shipped back to Britain to be melted down to make fighter planes, then forgotten as the tide turned.
Councillor Stephen Marsling campaigned to get the tank placed at the entrance to the new trading estate, a site which had previously been the goods depot's western gateway. It now forms the heart of the Mandela Way Peace Garden, a pocket park opened by Nelson Mandela during his four day visit to London in 1996, as a plaque on the rear wall attests. Delegates from Southwark's twin towns assemble in the garden on the anniversary of VE Day, at least in normal years, to hang a laurel garland from the gun attachment before retiring to The Victoria pub to raise a toast to the Bermondsey Panzer. It's very much not what you'd expect to find on a street corner in Bermondsey.
