Around Town

It really was a cold and foggy night. An evening when sensible folk were cuddling up to a beer or two in one of the many treasured ale houses of Southwark. But our small group had an appointment with death, in the catacombs beneath London Bridge.

Recent construction work on the Borough side had uncovered a cache of human bones. Builders soon reported strange noises and moving objects, and some refused to work. A visiting medium claimed to descry hundreds of tortured souls, including the shade of Guy Fawkes. The accursed site sits on Tooley Street beneath London Bridge. Fans of cyber-kitsch might remember the location as Cynthia’s, a little-lamented bar with robotic staff. The animatronics are about to return. Brothers Lee and Danny Scriven are turning the place into a shrine to London’s first and finest crossing.

The London Bridge Experience, opening on Friday, is part museum, part gore-fest, and shares similarities with those other local testaments to human suffering, the London Dungeon and the Clink Prison Museum. Convenient then, the cynics might say, that a host of spirits should turn up in the basement a few months before opening. Was it all just spooky spin, or can the attraction boast that its visitors are literally dying to get in? There was only one way for Time Out to find out…
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We gather at the foot of Nancy’s Steps, where the eponymous Dickens character ‘peached’ on Oliver Twist’s captors, and thus sealed her fate. It is an auspicious place to start. Co-owner Danny Scriven ushers us into the complex through an arched door beneath London Bridge. The place is very much a building site, but has obvious potential. Long corridors, gloomy alcoves and a labyrinthine floorplan seem custom-made for their new purpose. Danny is keen to point out how the venue will differ from other tourist hotspots in the area.

Digging deep in the catacombs

‘The London Bridge Experience is an educational attraction,’ he says. ‘The upper floor teaches the 2,000-year history of the bridge, from its Roman origins to the present.’ But there’s no getting away from the theatrics. As Danny shows us round the upper chambers, we are regaled with a parade of gore: heads on spikes, eight-foot models of death and pestilence, a Roman foot soldier anachronistically leaning against a grandfather clock.

Danny takes us down to the catacombs. Originally used for warehousing goods brought up the Thames, this level has been sealed off for decades. This is where the human remains were discovered. Police pathologists dated the bones to the mid-seventeenth century, so the leading theory is that these are the remains of plague victims. However, holes in several skulls suggest a more sinister provenance.

One member of our group is the perfect authority. Chris Roberts is author of ‘Cross River Traffic’, a book about London’s many bridges. ‘Offerings have always been made to bridges,’ he says, ‘and people were buried on the old London Bridge. So perhaps it’s appropriate that under the foundations of John Rennie’s nineteenth-century crossing is a bone yard, and one that few suspected was there.’ The bones are still down here, crudely separated into buckets.

Danny leaves us locked inside and a quick census registers five humans, at least 20 cadavers (boxed), an extensive family of mice and a troupe of animatronic zombies. We set off to explore. Work to convert the lower level into The London Tombs attraction is well under way, and model corpses are strewn haphazardly among the paint pots and sheeting. This surreal labyrinth contains a necrocopia of abominations, with macabre models round every corner. A back of-the-envelope calculation suggests half a kilometre of passages and chambers, all holding their own surprises.

So how does one pass 12 hours in such a place? Naturally, we open a bottle of wine, turn off all the lights and begin to tell ghost stories. The spooks start to fly within minutes. We become aware of a low moaning sound and the occasional thud from upstairs. Torchlit investigations eventually reveal the sources to be the Northern Line and revellers on Tooley Street. No ghosts as yet, then.

By midnight, the inevitable ouija board suggestion is aired. We fashion a cackhanded board from bits of paper and an upturned wine glass. In the long history of divination, few could have enjoyed more auspicious conditions than this witching-hour session over a recently disturbed plague pit, yards from human remains. Yet nothing happens, other than the customary accusations of glass pushing. Emboldened by the lack of visitations, yet weary from the late hour, we make our camp beds right over the site of exhumation. That’s when something finally does creep up on us – a deep and pleasant slumber.

We emerge the next morning blurry-eyed and a little queasy. One of our number passes out on the way home, and spends the morning vomiting. She later finds mysterious bruises along her arm. Spirits of one kind or another are thought to be the culprit.

The London Bridge Experience may or may not be haunted, but it should certainly be vaunted. The 2,000-year-old crossing deserves its own museum, and these recondite catacombs are an attraction in their own right.