What a City Does With Its Dead: London Below the Pavement

London has been continuously inhabited since around the year 50 of the common era. In two thousand years a city of two thousand year average mortality produces an enormous number of corpses. Where they went, and where they still are, is one of the most direct ways to read the city's history.

The short answer is that London has never solved the question of where to bury its dead. It has only ever postponed it. Each new burial system was built on top of the previous one, until the previous one filled, and then the new one filled too. The Roman cemeteries became the foundations for the Saxon ones. The medieval parish churchyards became the foundations for the early modern ones. The early modern churchyards became the foundations for the Victorian cemeteries, which became the foundations for the railway stations and office plazas of the twentieth and twenty-first. The dead are still there. The city walks on them.

The Roman cemeteries

Roman law forbade burials inside the city walls, so the Roman dead of Londinium were buried in cemetery zones outside the gates: along the road to Colchester east of the city, along Watling Street to the northwest, along the road to Dover south of the river. The eastern cemetery, which lay roughly where Aldgate, Tower Hill, and Whitechapel are now, has been excavated several times. Roman cremation urns, sarcophagi, grave goods, and skeletons have surfaced beneath the foundations of Victorian breweries, Edwardian banks, and twentieth-century office blocks. A complete Roman sarcophagus of a wealthy woman was found beneath Spitalfields in 1999. She had been buried in the third century. She was found seventeen hundred years later, two metres below ground, beneath a hospital that had been founded in 1197 directly on top of her.

The Romans did not know this woman would be found. The Spitalfields hospital builders in 1197 did not know they were building on her. The seventeenth-century houses built on top of the dissolved hospital in 1539 did not know about either layer. The 1999 developers found all three.

The medieval parish system

After Christianisation, the burial system became parish-based. Each of the City's roughly one hundred parishes had its own churchyard around its parish church. The churchyards were small, sometimes only a quarter-acre, and they had to absorb every death in the parish over hundreds of years. The Black Death of 1348 to 1350 killed perhaps half the population. The plague of 1665 killed perhaps a fifth. Between epidemics, ordinary mortality kept the churchyards turning over their soil constantly.

The solution was the charnel house. When a churchyard filled, sextons would exhume the older bones, clean them, and stack them in a stone vault beneath or beside the church. The Spitalfields charnel house, built around 1320 under the Priory of St Mary Spital, is one of the few surviving examples. It held bones from the priory hospital's overflow burials, stacked in vaults that you can still see today through glass panels set into the floor of Bishops Square, the modern office plaza above. More than ten thousand five hundred medieval burials have been excavated from the Spitalfields site, the largest archaeological cemetery excavation in Britain.

When Henry the Eighth dissolved the monasteries in the late 1530s, the priory was demolished, the charnel house was buried, and the site went out of memory. It came back in 1999 because of property development, and the office plaza was redesigned to leave the medieval vault visible through the floor. The current building is held up by columns that go around the bones.

The plague pits

The 1665 Great Plague killed at least one in five Londoners, somewhere between seventy and one hundred thousand people in a city of about four hundred and sixty thousand. The parish churchyards could not absorb that many deaths. The City and the surrounding parishes opened emergency burial grounds in fields beyond the walls: at Moorfields, at Bunhill, at Aldgate, at Holywell, at Spitalfields, at Tothill Fields in Westminster. These were the so-called plague pits. They were not actually pits in most cases, but consecrated ground used for mass interment. Bodies were laid in trenches, sometimes coffined, sometimes shrouded, sometimes neither, and covered with quicklime and earth as the trenches filled.

Most of these grounds were closed after the plague ended and then forgotten. They returned to the surface when the city expanded outward in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When Liverpool Street Station was originally built in 1874, the engineers cut through the Bedlam Hospital cemetery, which itself sat on top of a 1665 plague burial ground. When Crossrail expanded the same station between 2015 and 2018, archaeologists from the Museum of London Archaeology exhumed three thousand additional skeletons from beneath the ticket hall. Many of them had been buried in identifiable mass graves. DNA analysis confirmed Yersinia pestis, the plague bacterium, in tooth enamel from some of the bodies. The Crossrail excavation produced more information about the 1665 plague than any other archaeological work to date.

The Victorian crisis

By the early nineteenth century the inner-City churchyards were physically uncontainable. London's population had passed one million by 1801 and would pass two million by 1840. Parish churchyards meant for two thousand parishioners over four hundred years were trying to absorb a hundred thousand parishioners in a single generation. Burials in some churchyards were stacked seven or eight deep, sometimes with the older bodies still incompletely decomposed. The smell was a public-health emergency.

In 1832 Parliament passed legislation permitting the construction of large suburban cemeteries beyond the built-up area: Kensal Green, Highgate, Norwood, Nunhead, Brompton, Abney Park, Tower Hamlets. These are the seven so-called Magnificent Seven Victorian cemeteries, and they were where the City's middle class began to bury their dead from the 1830s onward. The Burial Acts of 1852 closed most of the inner-City churchyards entirely. Within a generation, the parish-burial system that had operated for nine hundred years was over.

The closed churchyards mostly became urban parks, garden squares, or building sites. St Olave Old Jewry, for example, became a small garden. The graves are still there. The headstones were moved to the walls. The parishioners are underneath the lawn.

The Blitz, and what came after

When the Luftwaffe firebombed the City of London on the night of 29 December 1940 and again throughout the spring of 1941, the bomb craters cut through a great many of the closed and forgotten burial grounds, exposing bones in the street. Postwar reconstruction had to deal with the exposed remains case by case, and the records are patchy. Some bones were collected and reburied. Some were left where they were and built over again. The postwar office canyons of the City are sitting on a layer that no one alive has fully mapped.

The continuing pattern is that every infrastructure project in London hits burials. The Jubilee Line extension in the 1990s found Roman graves. The Crossrail project of the 2010s found medieval and plague burials. The HS2 works at Euston in the 2020s exhumed twenty thousand skeletons from the eighteenth-century St James's burial ground to make room for the high-speed-rail terminus. Each find produces a small archaeological windfall and a logistical headache. Each is also a reminder that the soil of central London is not soil. It is fill. The fill is mostly the city's previous occupants.

What this means for a walk

The Dark London tour walks the question. The plague pit beneath Liverpool Street Station ticket hall. The medieval charnel house under glass at Spitalfields. The Saxon and Roman strata under All Hallows by the Tower. The Roman wall at Tower Hill that goes down twenty feet into eighteen hundred years of stacked construction. The Execution Dock at Wapping where pirates were buried in the river through three tides. Each stop is a different solution to the same question. None of the solutions worked. The question is still open. The city is still answering it, every time a developer cuts a new foundation.

London does not contain its dead. It contains itself, on top of its dead, with the dead reachable if you know where the glass panel is, or which station to look beneath, or which Roman wall is showing through the office lobby. Walking the Dark London tour is walking the same vertical column the dead were stacked in. The strata are unusually visible. That is the entire point.