I marched over London Bridge every summer for a few years in the 1960s together with other long-suffering pupils of St Dunstan's College of Catford, Lomdon, SE6. on our way from Cannon Street Station to Southwark Cathedral, just south of London Bridge. The ritual formed part of the honouring of the Freedom of the City of London bestowed on the college in the nineteenth century as it got its name from the church parish of St-Dunstan-in-the-East situated midway between the Monument and the Tower of London. We were always told that no other school/college had this honour, but that may have been propaganda. We were accompanied by City of London police constables on the first half and Met Police constables south of the river, and vehicular traffic was stopped while we processed. Most of us regarded it as a nice day off from school, because it was an academic institution then first and foremost, and apparently run on half a shoestring. If we'd not been a day school, I honestly think we'd have been a male equivalent of St Trinian's, with the most eccentric oddballs as teachers, many cast-offs from the state system, a defrocked vicar and one who used to receive his daily copy of the Russian communist state newspaper Pravda by post there!
Which is all to say that London Bridge itself and the areas within a mile or so from either end of it were the original Central London, or , rather, Londinium and no jiggery-pokery can alter that fact.
