The Charterhouse plague cemetery
March 2013. Beneath the western roadway of Charterhouse Square, Crossrail is preparing a shaft for ground-treatment works. Only metres from offices, St Bartholomew’s Hospital and modern…
TELL ME UK · GUIDES AND STORIES
London
Practical guides, city routes and the author’s London research. Choose a subject, then open the complete article.
Aldgate and the mass graves of the Great Plague
Imagine Aldgate in September 1665. Beyond the City’s eastern gate live porters, craftspeople, sailors, traders and families renting crowded rooms. Red crosses appear on doors. Watchmen…
St Olave Hart Street: Samuel Pepys, plague and the skull above the lane
It is a February night in 1666. Snow lies across a tiny City churchyard. Samuel Pepys walks through it with his wife for the first time since the epidemic. Beneath them are neighbours…
Crossbones: the burial ground of the Winchester Geese and its new memorial
Death on Redcross Way has no marble angel. It speaks through cheap beads, handwritten names, ribbons and small objects left by people who often do not know who lies beneath them. Beyond the…
Bedlam: from medieval hospital to a byword for cruelty
Search for Bedlam in central London and the city offers three ghosts. Beneath Liverpool Street Station is the site of a small medieval priory. Near Finsbury Circus, you can imagine the…
The Hunterian Museum: John Hunter's collection and the cost of knowledge
A young crocodile has been removed from its egg but remains attached by its umbilical cord. Nearby are bones, organs, vessels, instruments and drawings. The jars do not contain “monsters.”…
Resurrection men and the Old Operating Theatre at St Thomas'
At the top is a church attic. Medicinal plants once dried beneath the rafters. On one side are timber cupboards and the imagined scent of mint; on the other, steep rows face a table beneath…
Enon Chapel: the scandal of a crypt beneath a dancing room
Two buildings now dominate a district in which an entire lane disappeared. The Gothic mass of the law courts runs along one side. A church stands on its island in the traffic. There is no…
Highgate Cemetery: Victorian death culture and the vampire hunt
On one side of the road, West Cemetery rises through stone and foliage. Across from it, visitors enter the East side with maps and make their way towards Karl Marx’s grave. An ordinary…
Brompton Cemetery: Courtoy’s mausoleum, a time machine and a modern myth
London’s “time machine” does not stand in a laboratory or beneath a clock tower. It is a granite mausoleum approximately as tall as a two-storey house. Dark polished slabs rise to a…
The Ratcliff Highway murders: panic before the Metropolitan Police
In December 1811 there was no blue police tape on this road, no unified incident room and no detective responsible for every exhibit. When servant Margaret Jewell returned to the Marr house…
The Bermondsey Horror: Maria and Frederick Manning
In August 1849, a policeman noticed that the mortar around one flagstone in the kitchen of 3 Minver Place was still soft. Beneath the floor was a shallow pit containing quicklime. Inside it…