Museums & Attractions

London is built on bones. Since the Thames Valley was first occupied in 400,000 BC, millions of Londoners have lived, died and been buried beneath our soles. Most remain undisturbed, but many have been uprooted by rebuilding and, since the ’70s – when it became law for all excavation sites to be examined first by archeologists – handed to the Museum of London Archeology Service (Molas) to study and store. Twenty-six of the skeletons have been taken from their secret home at the Molas Centre for Human Bioarchaeology for display in a new exhibition at the Wellcome Collection, ‘Skeletons: London’s Buried Bones’, which opens next week.

Molas has 17,000 skeletons stacked in cardboard boxes inside the rotunda around which the museum is built. Bill White, who glories in the title of ‘curator of human remains’ is responsible for storing and cataloguing the 2 million bones at the museum, and his office is adorned with boxes of bones, skulls or, in the case of colleague Tania Kausmally’s desk, an entire skeleton, which she is painstakingly entering into the museum’s osteology database. This information will be posted on the museum’s website, providing a record of the ‘biggest collection of human remains from a single urban centre in the world’, according to White. Feature continues

Skeletons from large sites – 10,000 bodies were dug up from the Priory Hospital in Spitalfields – are of particular interest because of what they can reveal about the health, age and size of Londoners over a prolonged period. While it is difficult to gauge cause of death, White does have a motley selection of bones with ailments in his collection: ribs infected by cancer, twisted spines, a syphilitic fibula, an elbow fused by TB. A syphilitic skeleton will be on show at the Wellcome Collection.

Keep a foot fresh

Date of death is also difficult to calculate. ‘Some cemeteries have been in use for hundreds of years, and it is very hard to distinguish skeletons buried in the thirteenth century from those from the sixteenth,’ says White. ‘Bones reach a certain stage when it is hard to date them.’

As for that ghoulish favourite, the plague pit, White is sceptical. ‘We think there’s no such thing as plague pits, from the seventeenth century at least,’ he says. ‘There are mass graves in the churchyards, none of which have been excavated so far, but none outside of that. We do have 600 victims from the Black Death that were buried in what was the Royal Mint on Tower Hill. They were in huge trenches and there’s space at the end where clearly the plague had ended. Some of these people were buried so hastily they still had coins on them, which allows us to date them accurately.’

Molas's store boxes hold 17,000 skeletons

The youngest skeletons are from 1850, when the central London churchyards closed and London burials moved to the ‘magnificent seven’ cemeteries of Kensal Green, Nunhead, Highgate, Brompton, West Norwood, Tower Hamlets and Abney Park. Most are anonymous. Poor Londoners were traditionally buried in shrouds or cheap wooden coffins. Richer patrons, though, were buried in lead coffins, some with nameplates, such as Chelsea butcher William Wood, who will be on display at the Wellcome Collection, or Richard Hand, the eighteenth-century inventor of the Chelsea bun, who was hauled from his exclusive berth at Chelsea Old Church and has since been sitting on dusty shelves in a cardboard box alongside a thousand commoners. Equal only in death.

‘Skeletons: London’s Buried Bones’, Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Rd, NW1 (020 7611 2222/www.wellcomecollection.org) Euston tube/rail. July 23-Sept 28. Open Tue-Sat 10am-6pm, Thur until 8pm, Sun 11am-6pm. Adm free.