The Man Who Spent His Life Rebuilding Shakespeare’s Globe — and Never Saw It Open

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In 1949, a young American actor arrived in London and went looking for the most famous theatre in history. He walked along the south bank of the Thames, past warehouses and wharves, expecting to find a building, a monument — something. What he found was a small bronze plaque on a wall. It told him that Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre had once stood somewhere nearby, roughly 350 years earlier. There was nothing else.

That man was Sam Wanamaker. He would spend the next four decades trying to fix what he saw as one of history’s most remarkable oversights. Shakespeare’s Globe — rebuilt in 1997 — exists today because of what Wanamaker refused to accept that afternoon.

The Night the Globe Burned Down

The original Globe Theatre opened in 1599, built by Shakespeare’s own acting company using timber salvaged from a theatre demolished north of the river. It stood on the south bank of the Thames, in the borough of Southwark, which sat just outside the city’s jurisdiction — and its rules.

For nearly 15 years, it was the heart of London’s theatrical world. Shakespeare himself acted on its stage. Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth all had their first performances here, in front of audiences ranging from pickpockets in the yard to earls in the galleries.

Then, on 29 June 1613, a cannon prop misfired during a performance of Henry VIII. The spark caught the thatched roof. Within two hours, the entire building was gone. Remarkably, only one person was reportedly injured — a man whose breeches caught fire and were doused with ale.

The theatre was rebuilt the following year with a tiled roof. But in 1644, Puritan authorities demolished it entirely. Stage performances had been banned across England, and the Globe had no further use. After that, its very location was forgotten.

What Sam Wanamaker Found in London

Sam Wanamaker was born in Chicago in 1919. He built a promising career as an actor and director in America — until the early 1950s, when he was blacklisted during the McCarthy era for suspected communist sympathies. Unable to work in Hollywood, he moved to London with his family and eventually made Britain his permanent home.

The south bank of the Thames in those days was nothing like it is today. No galleries. No restaurants. No promenades. It was a stretch of industrial wharves, warehouses and dereliction. Nobody much visited it. Nobody particularly thought about what it had once been.

Wanamaker found it extraordinary — almost offensive — that the site of Shakespeare’s Globe had been allowed to disappear without a trace. One of the most significant cultural sites in the English-speaking world, and London had done nothing to mark, preserve or celebrate it. Just a small plaque, easy to miss, on a wall few people ever passed.

He decided he was going to rebuild it.

Twenty Years of Fighting for One Theatre

In 1970, Wanamaker set up the Shakespeare Globe Trust. His ambition was to reconstruct the theatre as close as possible to its original location, using Elizabethan building methods and materials, and to run it as a working theatre year-round.

Almost nobody took him seriously. The obstacles were enormous — building regulations, safety requirements, planning permissions, funding gaps that seemed impossible to close. Sceptics called it an American fantasy with no place in modern London.

He pushed back for two decades. He lectured across Britain and America. He charmed donors. He lobbied politicians. He wore down resistance year by year, setback by setback. The south bank slowly changed around him — galleries opened, the area came back to life — and the Globe project gradually began to feel less impossible.

Foundations were laid. Construction began. And in December 1993, Sam Wanamaker died of cancer — three years and five months before the theatre he had given his life to first opened its doors.

The Building That Broke London’s Rules

Shakespeare’s Globe opened to the public in June 1997. It stands roughly 230 metres from the original site, as close as modern buildings would allow.

The building is extraordinary in ways that are easy to miss. It is the only thatched structure in central London — the first permitted since the Great Fire of 1666. To get that permission, the builders installed concealed fire suppression systems inside the roof. Elizabethan builders did not have those.

The walls are lime plaster over an oak timber frame, joined with wooden pegs rather than nails. Craftspeople had to revive techniques not used commercially in Britain for several hundred years. Some skills were reconstructed entirely from written records and old illustrations.

The stage is open to the sky. When it rains during a performance, the actors get wet. So does part of the audience. This is not a design flaw — it is accurate to how Elizabethan theatre worked. Performances continued in all weathers, because that was the only option.

What It’s Like to Visit Shakespeare’s Globe Today

The Globe runs performances from April through to October each year, mixing Shakespeare’s own plays with work from his contemporaries — Marlowe, Webster, Jonson — and occasional new writing inspired by the period.

The cheapest way to experience it is as a groundling. For just £5, you can stand in the circular yard in front of the stage — exactly as the lowest-paying Elizabethan audiences did. The Globe has kept the groundling tradition deliberately, to make live theatre accessible regardless of budget.

Standing in that yard, with the stage at eye level and three tiers of wooden galleries curving around you, the experience is unlike anything else in London. There is no distance between audience and actor. A performer who walks to the edge of the stage is close enough to look you in the eye. On a bright summer afternoon, with the sky open overhead and voices carrying across the yard, it feels genuinely timeless.

Tours run year-round, with access to the stage and to the exhibition about the history of both Globes. The theatre sits in one of London’s richest areas for historical depth — a short walk brings you to Southwark Cathedral, where Shakespeare’s own brother Edmund is buried. If you are planning a South Bank day and want to make the most of the area, our London trip planning guide covers everything from transport to timing.

A Theatre Built by Stubbornness

Shakespeare’s Globe now attracts around 600,000 visitors a year. It stages hundreds of performances each season. It has become one of the most distinctive landmarks on the Thames and one of London’s most loved cultural institutions.

Sam Wanamaker has a plaque on the wall near the theatre he built. It is the kind of modest, easy-to-miss memorial he spent his career trying to replace. London has a talent for that kind of irony.

His daughter Zoe — a celebrated actress in her own right — was in the front row on opening night in 1997. She watched the first performance in the theatre her father had spent his life building, on the banks of the river he had walked in 1949 looking for a plaque on a wall.

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