Britain’s historic capital has had its fair share of drama. Notwithstanding great fires that have torn through the city, the riots that have brought the capital to its knees, and devastating civil wars, London has borne witness to scores of plagues, pestilences, and public executions. Yet showing true British resolve, London has withstood all of this, keeping calm and carrying on to become one of the European (if not global) centres of culture and commerce.
That is until Brexit.
Though today’s city might not show it, London was built on shaky foundations. Even in the ancient world, the city was the site of some horrendous violence. Even as far back as 60 AD, the city was essentially sacked, when Queen Boudicca stormed the city and put thousands of its inhabitants to the sword (a historical episode that makes the statue of her at the end of Westminster Bridge somewhat problematic).
With over 2,000 years of continuous inhabitation, London is bursting with history. And this history isn’t just confined to its hundreds of museums, churches, and galleries. Wander the streets of Whitechapel, for example, as you follow in the footsteps of the Ripper, and you sometimes catch a glimpse. But even beneath the very streets you walk are countless stories of London’s dark and violent past. You just have to know where to look.
The “Great Stink” of 1858
Britain isn’t famous for its sweltering summers. But when they do come, we easily find cause to complain. It seems the summer of 1858 was worthy of complaint, especially if you were unfortunate enough to be living in London. For through the haze of heat and pollution, the baking sun toasted the mounds of human excrement piling up on the banks of the River Thames.
The stench this created was bad enough to drive British parliamentarians out of Westminster, or at least those who hadn’t already fled to their houses in the country through fear of joining the thousands of others who were perishing from cholera. When you consider that in 1858 there were a fair few pressing issues on the parliamentary agenda—not least Britain’s involvement in an opium war over in China and a full-scale mutiny in India—this gives you an idea of just how bad the situation was. Even the lime-soaked curtains parliamentarians hid themselves behind to soften the stench couldn’t persuade them to stay.
Extreme times called for extreme measures, and to ensure that this “evil odour” could never resurface, the government appointed Sir Joseph Bazalgette to revolutionise the city’s sewage system. This was, as you can imagine no easy task. London’s population had more than doubled between 1800 and 1850, and along with it so had the amount of waste the city had to accommodate. Worse still, there was nothing to separate the contaminated water of the Thames from the water London’s citizens were drinking.
As humourist and cleric Sydney Smith once remarked, “He who drinks a tumbler of London water has in his stomach more animated beings than there are men, women, and children on the face of the globe.”
The former rail engineer, Sir Peter Bazalgette, proved himself up to the job. With the £3 million he had been allocated, he set about building a number of embankments along the Thames—Victoria, Albert, and Chelsea—as well as constructing an 82-mile network of interconnected sewers, treatment works, and pumping stations, planned with remarkable foresight for future population growth and extreme cases of flooding.
Testament to their efficacy is the fact that they still serve London’s 8.8 million residents today.
London is Pockmarked with Hidden Plague Pits
Like any historic European metropolis, London has endured its fair share of plague outbreaks. The first major pestilence, known to history as the Black Death, came in 1348 with the arrival of some unwanted fleas from the continent (coming over here, decimating half of London’s population etc.). The Black Death claimed some 40,000 people before finally dissipating in 1350. The city would have to wait 300 years for the next major outbreak. But there were many minor ones in between: around 40 between the Black Death and the Great Plague.
The Great Plague (which really wasn’t all that great) flourished in the putrid conditions of London’s streets. Within just two years between 1665 – 1666, it claimed well over 100,000 lives, some 15% of the city’s population, leaving the dead littering the streets or rotting away at home. The problem the survivors found themselves faced with was what to do with them.
Though church graveyards were the most obvious port of call, it wasn’t long before god’s terrestrial waiting rooms became a little overcrowded. “Bringing out your dead”, leaving the bodies out in the open to spread disease, wasn’t an option, so London’s residents set about hastily digging out plague pits in which to throw the victims. Dozens of these have been discovered as various construction projects have forced us to scratch beneath the surface of this millennia-old city.
What’s more, plague pits are still being discovered. As recently as 2013, an enormous pit was discovered under Farringdon’s Charterhouse Square, just 8 feet (2.5 metres) below the ground. It’s cramped all right: the resting place of up to 50,000 victims of the Black Death. But as macabre as it may be when a new pit is unearthed, London’s residents can rest easy. Scientists assure us that there’s nothing contaminable in the ground.
Mass Graves Did Not Divert the London Underground
Forget recent horror flicks Creep and The Midnight Meat Train — getting trapped in the London Underground late at night just got a whole lot scarier. Wherever you go in London, you’re likely to be walking above some grave or another. London is, as the author of Necropolis: London and its Dead, Catherine Arnold, recently put it, essentially one giant burial ground. But if you happen to be riding the London Underground, be aware that during your commute you’re likely to be skirting past thousands upon thousands of human remains.
The idea that the dead had a say in the design of the underground is, however, a myth. The most common anecdote is that between the stations of Knightsbridge and South Kensington, the underground line curves to circumvent an enormous plague pit hidden beneath Hyde Park. Filling this pit are the remains of thousands of victims of the Great Plague (1665 – 1666), hurriedly thrown in by friends, family, or strangers all desperately hoping they wouldn’t soon be following behind.
The authorities decided to drill around Hyde Park rather than through (or rather 40 – 80 feet under) the remains there. But it wasn’t because the plague pit that underlies Hyde Park is such a densely packed impermeable mass of twisted, tangled human bones that, even with the tools at their disposal in the nineteenth century, the workmen simply couldn’t drill through. It was because, where possible, line planners decided to follow the course of publicly owned roads (Brompton Road in this case) in order to avoid the risk of undermining housing foundations.
This isn’t to say that those working on the lines over the last couple of centuries haven’t come across human remains. Alan Jackson, in his detailed documentation of route digging between Paddington and King’s Cross in 1862, stumbled across the remains of many past Londoners. Rather than an impenetrable wall, however, it was a small enough number that he could call the London Necropolis Company and have them removed.
St. Sepulchre really was not the best place to live
That is unless you were into robbing graves or attending public executions, in which case it was arguably the best neighbourhood in London. Most of the action took place around the Church of the Holy Sepulchre—still the largest parish church in the city centre—or at scaffolds a couple of miles west at Tyburn, where every six weeks thousands of spectators would assemble to gawk at dozens of condemned men, women, and children being sent to meet their maker.
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was founded around the middle of the twelfth century. It was all but completely destroyed by the Great Fire of 1666 (as you’re probably coming to realize, the 1600s truly was a shitter of a century ) before being rebuilt to take on its present form. Its extensive graveyard provided tempting pickings for thieving opportunists, especially when its necropolitan population would swell in the wake of one serious outbreak of another.
Grave robbing was, in fact, such a popular seventeenth-century pastime that the government ordered the building of a Watch House to deter potential miscreants. Grave robbers didn’t do it for the love of course. Medical students keen to get together for a good old-fashioned dissection paid handsomely for the bodies of recently deceased murderers (the only ones they would accept): around £50 which is a fortune in today’s money.
The church is still home to its original Execution Bell, the function of which is easily discernable from the name. It would be rung whenever there was a public execution: partly to announce the spectacle to those living close by, and partly to provide an eerie soundtrack as the condemned made their journey from nearby Newgate Prison or the Old Bailey to the scaffolds at Tyburn.
The Ghost of a 13-Year-Old Girl Still Haunts Farringdon Station
If you think life was tough for the average person during the eighteenth century, spare a moment’s thought for the children of one of London’s many workhouses.
Made to live in appalling conditions, children—often orphans—as young as 12 would be sent to work there. Ostensibly as apprentices, but in reality as little more than slave labourers. One such girl was Anne Naylor who, with her sister, was entrusted to the care of Sarah Metyard and her daughter Sally as apprentices in their millinery (or women’s hats) shop.
I say “care” lightly, because the Metyards were complete and utter sociopaths.
They derived great pleasure in inflicting pain upon the girls they employed, dishing out beatings like they were going out of fashion while dishing out considerably of what the girls actually needed: food. Young Anne was a sickly child, and her inability to keep up with the demands of her work singled her out for particularly nasty abuse. This eventually became too much for Anne, and she tried to escape. But she was soon apprehended by a boy who worked there and brought back to face the Metyard’s rage.
Anne was beaten and consigned to the attic, where she was given just enough bread and water to survive. Again she tried to escape, but again she was unsuccessful. Sally caught her roaming London’s streets, and after dragging her home had her tied to the attic door where she was beaten mercilessly with a broom. On the fourth day of Anne’s sadistic ordeal, one of the apprentices noticed she wasn’t moving. Believing she was faking it, Sarah administered another beating (this time with a shoe). Perhaps there’s a small mercy in the fact that Anne could not feel it.
The Metyards tried to cover up the murder. They hid Anne’s body in her room, leaving the door slightly ajar, and continued to bring bread and water. However, Anne’s sister noticed something was amiss and shared her suspicions with a lodger (for which she paid with her life). Two months later, with Anne’s body going putrid, the Meynards disembodied it and dumped it near a sewer on Chick Lane. They would have gotten away with it, but an argument between the two resulted in Sally confessing to the authorities (thinking she wouldn’t be incriminating).
They were arrested, tried, and hanged on July 19, 1768. Sarah Metyard passed out on the way to the gallows at Tyburn, but was hanged unconscious to the gleeful jeers of the crowd. As for Anne Naylor, her ghost outlived her tormentors, haunting the grounds on which her earthly remains had been unceremoniously dumped. Legend has it that her cries can still be heard by unfortunate commuters taking the underground from Farringdon station.
“Duck Baiting” was All the Rage in Eighteenth-Century London
British pubs may still be famous for their games, but we can be thankful that they’re now a lot less bloody. For while Londoners weren’t unique in Europe for deriving a great deal of pleasure from watching animals participate in blood sports, their ingenuity when it came to devising variations of condemning animals to death was really quite something.
The innocuously sounding “Dog and Duck” pub in Soho pays testament to a particularly nasty sport known as duck baiting. Pinioned so it couldn’t fly away, a duck would be released into a shallow pond where a dog would be sent to join it. Bets would be placed on how long it would take the dog to catch the duck (whose only means of prolonging the inevitable was to dive underwater).
Duck baiting was participant-friendly too, with spectators often throwing stones in an attempt to disable the duck, and an apparent favourite of King Charles II, whose other hobbies included hiding up trees and waging war against the Dutch.
Another popular sport—and one much easier to host in a pub as it didn’t require a pond—was rat baiting. Matches (if we can call them such) were widely advertised and well attended with London’s rich and poor rubbing shoulder to see how many rats their terriers, mastiffs, or bulldogs could kill within the confines of a 15 square-foot pit. During the interval, two rival dogs would be made to compete against each other and see how many vermin they could kill within an allotted time.
A terrier called Billy (or perhaps “Billy the Blind” owing to the fact he had just one eye and two teeth) was famous for killing 100 rats in five minutes and thirty seconds—which works out at a rate of one rat every three seconds or so. Billy’s (dubiously prestigious) record wasn’t to last, however. Thirty years later, in 1862, a dog named Jacko beat the record by two seconds; helped in no small part, I imagine, by the simple fact he had more teeth…
Executions Took Place in the Tower of London Until Recently
Built between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, the Tower of London has had a fair few famous residents over the centuries. Rather than serving as a battlement, however, its most famous function has been that of a holding place for such illustrious prisoners as the Scottish king John Balliol, Henry VIII’s wives Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, and favourite of Elizabeth I, Sir Walter Raleigh.
The Tower’s association with death is so strong, in fact, that it has given the British their idiom “to be sent to the tower”, meaning to be imprisoned or punished (or indeed both). It saw its heyday of executions during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Most of the condemned wouldn’t meet their end within the tower walls, however, but would be taken to Tower Hill, just north of the castle. But although over the last few centuries the Tower has gradually lost its function as a place of execution, it may surprise you to learn that the last one didn’t take place that long ago.
In early February 1941, Joseph Jakobs, a 43-year-old German dentist, was apprehended shortly after parachuting into England. He had raised the suspicious of local farmers when he was seen limping around the countryside (he had broken his ankle upon landing) and firing his pistol. Their suspicions that he was a German spy were confirmed when he was found in possession of forged identity papers, a radio transmitter, and—quite bizarrely—a German sausage.
Jakobs was tried before a military tribunal between 4 – 5 August the same year, and after being found guilty of spying was sentenced to death. His execution took place on the morning of 15 August 1941 in the Tower’s miniature rifle range. After being blindfolded, Jakobs was sent before an eight-man firing squad where he was made to sit in a brown Windsor chair. He was shot five times (three men were given blanks) and died instantly. A post-mortem was to reveal, however, that only one of the shots had pierced the heart and therefore been fatal.
For Almost 100 years, London Ran a Train Service Exclusively for the Dead
In Ancient Greece, the dead would have coins placed over their eyes so they could pay the infernal boatman Charon to ferry them across the River Styx to their final resting place. In nineteenth-century London, the dead would be brought a train ticket and ferried from Waterloo’s Necropolis Station to a purpose-built cemetery 23 miles southwest in Brookwood, Surrey.
By the mid-nineteenth century, London was in desperate need of more burial space. Just 218 acres within the city had to accommodate around 50,000 deaths every year. The situation was getting so critical that it was becoming common practice to exhume rotting corpses at night and illegally cremate them to save up room for newcomers. Lovely. Parliament eventually voted to ban new burials in the centre and divert funds to building necropolises in green spaces surrounding the city.
Brookwood Cemetery opened in 1854 with its station opening 10 years later. The latter provided a service to friends and family; unlike the journey across the Styx they had the option of going with them without also having to shuffle off their mortal coil. Typically in keeping with the British class system, first, second, or third class tickets were available both for the living and the dead (god forbid corpses of different classes should have to ride together)
Not everybody felt comfortable with the idea though. In 1842, the Bishop of London described the whole as “improper” and at odds with the solemnity that should characterise a Christian funeral. In 1902, a new railway station opened on Westminster Bridge Road to replace the old one. However, it wouldn’t stay in service for long. To a large extent, the mass influx of automobiles made trains redundant when it came to shipping the dead off for burial.
Necropolis Station arrived at its final destination in 1941, during the London Blitz, when a German bomb tore through it. This marked the end of what a 1904 edition of Railway Magazine described as “the most peaceful railway service in the three corners of the kingdom.” What we can say for sure is that for 87 years, London ran the only service in the city’s history in which none of its passengers submitted a single complaint.
