London

With so many of us crammed into such a narrow space, it is inevitable that we share it with the dust of our ancestors. It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that the inner-city burial grounds were closed, and the Necropolis railway was established to carry the dead to a new cemetery on the barren heaths.

While the pagans were content to bury their most illustrious dead in earthworks (lesser mortals being consigned to ditches), the situation changed when the Romans invaded in AD 43. The Romans feared their dead and buried them in cemeteries along the roads leading out of town, where the spirits would not haunt the living. They also cremated their dead and buried the remains in ceramic urns, a practice subsequently banned by the Christians and not revived until 1900, when cremation was officially sanctioned with the founding of Golders Green Crematorium. Whether the bodies were burned or buried, death was an elaborate ritual for the Romans, with corpses entombed with their favourite possessions, the ‘grave goods’ that often reflected the occupant’s personality. A recent excavation in SE1 uncovered the coffin of Harper Road Woman, prepared to greet the afterlife with cosmetics, a hand mirror and a pitcher of wine – every inch a defiant south London girl.

Feature continues

Epidemics posed a major challenge to the way London dealt with its dead. The Black Death of 1348-49 wiped out half the population and put such a strain on existing churchyards that two new burial grounds were created: ‘No Man’s Land’, outside Smithfield, and its extension at Spitalfields, which ‘swallowed over 50,000 dead’, according to a sixteenth-century historian. The plague, a frequent visitor to Britain, culminated three centuries later in the horrific outbreak of 1665 when at least 68,000 people (of a population of half a million) ‘died in heaps and were buried in heaps’, as Daniel Defoe records in ‘A Journal of the Plague Year’. Originating in Covent Garden, the plague spread rapidly. In scenes reminiscent of a seventeenth-century ‘28 Days Later…’, the dead lay in the streets and the infected were incarcerated in their own homes at the mercy of homicidal nurses who robbed the dying and then perished themselves. The diarist Samuel Pepys, who bravely stayed put throughout this nightmarish episode, witnessed endless funeral processions from the window of his office on Bankside. Pepys’ own doctor was among the victims, after performing an autopsy on a plague victim in a desperate bid to find a cure. Crude, violent men known as ‘bearers’ collected the bodies, their desperation for money outweighing their fear. One, named Buckingham, was later prosecuted for his habit of displaying the naked corpses of deceased young women at the edge of mass graves. With the churchyards overflowing, plague pits were sunk from the orchards of Fulham to Gypsy Hill, and from Tothill Fields, Westminster, to Kensington. The great pit of Aldgate, 40 foot by 15 foot and 20 foot deep, consumed 1,114 bodies within a fortnight.

The plague pits were never memorialised. In many cases they were built over, only to be discovered two centuries later. The Piccadilly Line between Knightsbridge and South Kensington owes its curving shape to the fact that engineers were unable to drill through the accumulated mass of human remains, where the army had buried victims in Hyde Park.

Overcrowding has been another issue. By the 1830s, the population of London had risen to over 2 million and the average life expectancy was 30 (for a professional), and just 17 for a labourer, compounded by frequent epidemics of cholera and scarlet fever. In 1839, George Alfred Walker, a Drury Lane surgeon, chronicled the ‘pestiferous’ condition of London’s burial grounds in his sensational ‘Gatherings from Graveyards’. Details included coffins smashed up for firewood at the notorious ‘Green Ground’, off Portugal Street, WC2; human skulls rolling away as remains were carted off to rubbish dumps; and accounts of sextons ‘tapping’ coffins to release the build-up of corpse gas. Failure to do so occasionally resulted in explosions, such as the one in the vaults of St James’s, Piccadilly, which burned for days. It was Walker who revealed the scandal of Enon Chapel, where a scheming minister had buried over a thousand bodies in the basement.