As Mexico City archaeologists sort through the surreal array ofAztec sacrificial skulls recently expose while excavating their city ’s underground arrangement , it ’s deserving think back that parts of the London Underground were also tunneled , blasted , picked , and drilled through a labyrinth of infestation pits and necropolis .
https://gizmodo.com/archaeologists-discover-aztec-ritual-skulls-under-mexic-1493102007
In her excellent and morbidly fascinating bookNecropolis : London and Its Dead , author Catharine Arnold describes in detail the subterraneous presence of corps find throughout the British majuscule . To no small extent , she makes clear , dead bodies were essentially sink everywhere , to the point that , as Arnold pithily states , “ London is one elephantine grave . ”
Here are just a few of my favorite examples , all of them taken from Arnold ’s book , of how London is saturate from below with corpses , and I ’d encourage anyone concerned in this sort of thing simply to corrupt a copy ofNecropolis .
Finally , at the remainder of this postal service , we ’ll get back to how all these bodies affect the construction of the Tube — London ’s metro — which is why this mail was started in the first place .
London Hospital scholarly person encounter football on hospital ground ; picture courtesy Getty Images
Hollow Ground
The London Hospital maintained its own on - land site burial ground for six years , from 1849 to 1854 . However , Arnold explains , “ burials continued until about 1860 , with Cole Albert Porter act as gravediggers . ” Somewhat amazingly , we learn that lodging projects for the medical staff were then built over these old graveyards — and the casket were not very far below the surface .
As Arnold describes , this made for some rather unsafe priming coat condition :
The remaining part of the sepulture ground became a garden for nurses and aesculapian scholar , complete with tennis court of justice , “ where they are in the habit of caper about in their short times off - obligation , and where it sometimes happens that the locoweed gives direction beneath them — an average natural event when the subsoil is inhabited by coffins ! ”
In other give-and-take , these lawn tennis - play nurse “ caper about ” on their skunk tennis courts would occasionally and literally fall through the surface of the earth only to find themselves standing in the moulder casket shroud under the soil , an infernal honeycomb of badly run graves like something out of Dante .
This image — of woman lark in their nineteenth - century play gear abruptly falling into coffins — is absolutely astonishing and surely belong in a movie descend soon to a cinema near you .
Ooh, That Smell
Far more horrifically , some local churches got in on the fiscal action of corpse garbage disposal by accepting utter bodies — along with the high fees associated with their burial — only to do nothing at all with the corpses but slash them down into the root cellar .
One Christian church was so bad , Arnold indite , that its parishioner would often pass out from the horrible smell of molder and partially liquid dead body wafting up from below .
Photo courtesy Fox Photos / Getty Images
A peculiarly hair-raising location described by Arnold is Enon Chapel , a Baptist church establish “ as a speculative speculation . ” That is , the parson — a Mr. W. Howse — was in it purely for the money .
Arnold ’s own verbal description of what happened next pronounce it best :
adoration there was a dangerous business ; for members of the congregation frequently passed out — yet , because nobody suppose at the minister ’s appalling mystery , it never occurred to them that the cause of their unwellness repose beneath a tenuous stratum of floorboards , in the vault of the chapel service .
In tender , moist weather , local residents were assaulted by a oddly disgusting smell . Occasionally , when a firing was lit in a nearby building , an intolerable stench arose , which did not originate from the drain . Vast numbers of rats infested the houses ; and meat exposed to the atmosphere turned putrid after an minute or two .
The parishioners could even taste it , seemingly : an bitter , oily slick on their tongue , lead from the humid cadaver - fog that filled the Christian church , a form of stilted conditions organization created by the dissolving organic structure of the dead jumbled up beneath the floor board .
Mind - bogglingly , when all of this was finally discovered , how many corpse do you think London metropolis office found down there ? Several twelve ? A few hundred , perhaps ?
They found twelve thousand corpses . 12,000 corps all turn into jello and contaminating the local H2O supply .
The Unforgettable Fire
Yet those churchgoer were golden to escape with their own life . At times , Arnold publish , London ’s urban burial grounds simply detonate , their flash casket hazardously over - pressurized from within with corpse gas .
Image courtesy Getty Images
The resulting subterranean infernos , for the most part throttle to the crypts and basements of churches , were physically wicked and not at all easy to extinguish . “ In the 1800s , ” Arnold writes , “ fires beneath St. Clement Dane ’s and [ architect Christopher ] Wren ’s Church of St. James ’s in Jermyn Street destroyed many bodies and sting for mean solar day . ”
To avail preclude these weighty turkey from bursting , Sexton of the churches were necessitate to “ tap ” the coffins now and again ; this tapping would jostle the bodies within and thus “ facilitate the escape of gases which would otherwise detonate from their confinement . ”
A Pyramid to Rival Giza
We ’ve looked atthe plan and expression of perpendicular cemeteriesbefore here on Gizmodo , but necropolitan enterpriser in London were reckon into this about 200 years ago . Why bury , in other language , when you could ramp up ?
Six Feet Over : The time to come of Skyscraper Cemeteries
Specifically , Arnold explains , an architecturally inclined businessman named Thomas Willson once “ proposed a vast pyramid for Primrose Hill . At an estimated cost of £ 2,500 , this monumental mausoleum , higher than St. Paul ’s , would take five million Londoner . ”
Intended to invoke solemnity and inspire awe , Willson ’s prodigious geometric structure was to be fund through subscription and run by a corporation call the Pyramid General Cemetery Company . As Arnold describes it :
Constructed from brick , with granite cladding , the plans comprised a chapel service , office , quarters for the Keeper , Clerk , Sexton and Superintendent , four entree and a central ventilation shaft . A series of splash paths would earmark bodies to be moved . Each catacomb took up to twenty - four coffins and could be seal up after all burial had been finish . resemble a hive , it would be a thing of veneration and wonder to all who saw it .
The Great Pyramid was never constructed , of course , but perhaps in our own geological era of London megaprojects , some brick and granite Giza might yet emerge on the marshy edge of Ithiel Town to underpin and protect the dead of southeast England .
Drill, Baby, Drill
All of which in the end lend us to the real understanding I started write this Charles William Post , which was to order the chronicle of how these corpses — the city absolutely littered with burial grounds and plague pits — came to shape the construction of London ’s Underground geartrain system . It ’s a brief anecdote , but it ’s both ghoulish and interesting .
As Arnold points out , there is an otherwise incomprehensible fault in direction in the Piccadilly line die east out of South Kensington . “ In fact , ” she write , “ the burrow curve between Knightsbridge and South Kensington stations because it was impossible to bore through the mass of skeletal remains buried in Hyde Park . ”
Put another way , the ground was so solidly packed with the interlocked frame of seventeenth - century victims of the Great Plague that the Tube ’s 19th - century excavation squad could n’t even hack their way through them all . The Tube thus deviates SW - by - NE to avoid this huge congested knot of skulls , ribs , branch , and arms tangled in the filth — an artificial geology made of people , caught in the throat of greater London .
Image courtesy Hulton Archive / Getty Images
Thus , like the example of the Aztec skull unearth by tube bunch in Mexico City , London ’s Tube also sit atop , cut around , and tunnel through a citywide charnel ground of corpse , its very routes and post location frequent by this earlier mien in the ground below .
For many more macabre and interesting stories of London ’s dead , check into out a written matter ofNecropolis .
Lead image courtesy Getty Images / Oli Scarff
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