View of 161-177 Borough High Street, Southwark. To the right, numbers 175 and 177 are four-storey buildings with boarded-up shop fronts on the ground floor. Number 175, with a sign G. MILLER, has sash windows on the floors above. Number 177 is a late-seventeenth century house with a twentieth-century facade. Occupied in the 1920s by Boutle & Drewett Ltd, woollen drapers, it is Grade II listed, number 1378365. These building have been redeveloped and both now are of the original design of number 175. They are in use as offices and known as Delta House. Borough High Street is one of the oldest streets in London being the main thoroughfare from London Bridge to Kent since antiquity. Excavations on this site in 1976 revealed two rooms of a clay and timber Roman building, and three wood-lined walls. Pottery from the dig has been dated to the late-first century. Number 173 is a four-storey corner building; 'The Blue Eyed Maid', with a public house sign hanging from the first floor, with the Watney's Brewery barrel above. The public house is believed to have existed since 1613 and in 1841, the landlord of the Blue Maid was James Mantle who lived there with his wife and two of his children. The public house closed in 2020. "Blue Maid Court" is mentioned in Surrey Quarter Sessions from 1738, and is now Chapel Court, named after a chapel that occupied the site. Number 169 is a three-storey corner building with attic. The ground-floor shop 'Presto Bar' cafe has advertisements in the windows for Pepsi and Tizer. In the first-floor windows is a sign for 'Sidney Jones, Import and Export'. The whole building is now offices. Numbers 163-165 are four and five-storey buildings combined as one, with a shop front on the ground floor occupied by 'Langley London Limited, The Tile Centre'. Originally set up as 'Merchant Shippers' in 1920 by Frederick Algernon Langley, later the business diversified into the importation of clay roof tiles, industrial paviours, ceramic wall and floor tiles. This part of the business was sold but it continues to trade as Business Brokers. Number 165 is now a cafe and number 163 an off-licence. Between the buildings is a passageway called Mermaid Court, previously Mermaid Alley, and was the entrance to the sixteenth-century Mermaid Inn, by the side of the original Marshalsea Prison. The passageway is narrow and in 1733 a woman was pressed to death in the crowd in Mermaid Court during the fair time. The area was badly damaged by bombing during World War II. Number 161, a five-storey building with a balustraded balcony on the top floor, and a shop on the ground floor is now a restaurant.