Waking the dead

Beneath the City of London’s modern buildings, bustling stations and gleaming coffee shops lie thousands of skeletons.

The capital’s burial sites and plague pits are testament to its often difficult 2,000-year history. During the Black Death, which is estimated to have killed between one third to half of the country’s population, the city quickly ran out of space to dispose of all the victims.

In a mass grave next to Smithfield more than 200 corpses a day were buried. Excavation of East Smithfield cemeteries has revealed bodies were stacked five or six deep.

“[Charterhouse Square] is the site of one of London’s earliest plague pits,” says Alice Ford-Smith, Principal Librarian at Dr Williams’s Library, one of London’s oldest libraries. “Thousands of bodies were buried here during the Black Death and the pit was reopened during the Great Plague.”

“The use of mass graves was dictated not only by the difficulty of finding space in the already overcrowded burial grounds but also the need to bury corpses as quickly as possible to reduce the risk of infection,” she continues. “Visitors were banned from the area, initially to reduce infection but then to stop desperate people throwing themselves into the pit.” 
 
Crossrail skeletons

With some major construction project underway across London, including six new tunnels and nine stations that make up the £15.9bn Crossrail project, it is little surprise that occasionally a skeleton or two is uncovered.

What is perhaps surprising is the scale of some of the finds along the Crossrail project, being built to link Heathrow Airport, the West End, City of London and Canary Wharf.

One is just a stone’s throw away from Lloyd’s One Lime Street address. Crossrail’s new ticket hall at Liverpool Street is to be built on the site of hundreds of graves of the patients from London’s most infamous psychiatric hospital. Opened in 1247, St Bethlehem is thought to have inspired the word “bedlam”. Its crowded burial ground was used from 1569 to the mid-19th century.

Eighty-five burials have been discovered so far and further excavation pits will reveal if the remains in the rest of the site are in a similar condition to those already uncovered. Archaeologists have also uncovered pottery fragments, clay pipes, knife handles and other implements.

Crossrail’s contractor, the Museum of London, will study the remains for insight into the lives of the St Bethlehem patients – and to find out more about diet, disease and mortality during the late Middle Ages. It is thought some Roman artefacts may also be uncovered as the site is located just outside the London wall that enclosed the Roman city of Londinium.

This find is the latest in a long line of gruesome archaeological discoveries made in and around London’s rail and underground network, and it’s thought there are many yet to be uncovered. At present there are 20 digs taking place along the Crossrail route, which have to be completed as part of the planning regulations.

“Plague pits haunt the London commuter,” says Ford-Smith. “Where Aldgate Station is now, 1,000 people were buried in just two weeks. Elsewhere, the escalator at Camden Town probably passes through another mass grave and at a site near Liverpool Street Station the bones of more than 300 skeletons were found. So many boots were dug up there that it’s assumed the plague victims died with their shoes on and were then thrown indiscriminately into the pit.” 

Insuring the unexpected

While fascinating and informative, the discovery of a site of archaeological significance can mean massive delays for a construction project. The excavation process is a meticulous and expensive one and archaeological digs can take months if not years to complete.

Specialist contingency insurance can be purchased to protect developers against long and costly delays caused by an unexpected archaeological find.