THE CEMETERY HIDING LONDON’S SEEDY PAST

It’s not often you stumble across a medieval burial ground that’s hidden in plain sight a couple of minutes stroll from London Bridge. If it wasn’t for the rows of flowers and ribbons in changing states of deterioration adorning the gate and railings, you might never know you’d come across Cross Bones Cemetery.

For many years, local residents and tourists to London’s Bankside have passed the iconic gates on Red Cross Way and touched the ribbons, and left some of their own. The sparkle and wealth of The Shard and the developments around London Bridge bely Southwark’s gritty past. This concealed land behind the gates is Crossbones, a post-medieval un-consecrated cemetery that remained in use until 1853.

Southwark’s relationship with prostitution goes all the way back to the first century AD when conquering Roman soldiers used the region as a home base. Whorehouses functioned in the area for many centuries, through the Viking age and the Crusades. It became particularly widespread after the 12th-century building of a permanent London Bridge. This fetched a continual stream of business to the area’s taverns. By then, Southwark was controlled by the Bishop of Winchester, one of the oldest, wealthiest and most significant dioceses in England. Among his other powers, the Bishop of Winchester had the right to license and tax the borough’s prostitutes. The prostitutes were mockingly known as ‘Winchester Geese,’ perhaps after their tradition of exposing their white breasts to lure clients. If you were ‘bitten by a Winchester Goose’ was to get a sexually transmitted disease, usually syphilis or gonorrhoea.

We don’t know when the first burials took place at Cross Bones. The first mention of the graveyard came in 1598 when John Stow, writing in his famous book, ‘A Survey of London’, stated a ‘Single Woman’s Churchyard’ In this perspective ‘single woman’ is a euphemism for a prostitute. Even though the prostitutes worked within the area and were licensed by the Bishop of Winchester, they were not permitted to be buried on consecrated ground.

It’s anticipated the bodies of over fifteen thousand people are buried there – approximately half of which were young children and foetuses. It’s a sad spot that tells the stories of the city’s marginalised, the poor and the prostitutes buried on a small patch of unconsecrated ground.

If you look closely, you’ll see a plaque that honours ‘The Outcast Dead’, a sentiment, also replicated in a remembrance service that takes place on Halloween and at a four weekly vigil at the graveyard itself.

Growing around the fact it was outside the responsibility of the Sheriff of London, in the 12th century, the area was known as The Liberty of the Clink. The Liberty was where Londoners could let their hair down and do all the bad things that would have got them into severe trouble on the other side of the Thames.

When Oliver Cromwell shut down The Liberty in the 17th century, the graveyard progressed to extend to the burial of paupers. Southwark developed into one of the worst areas in London, jammed with slums in which sickness ran rife. Cholera, tuberculosis and many other diseases helped swell the graveyard’s numbers until it closed in 1853.

An archaeological dig in 1992 revealed the area was layered with bodies, some piled in mass graves. Even more gruesome, the dig led to the detection that many of the bodies in the graves were foetuses or infants under the age of twelve months. Investigators also found many of the bodies in the cemetery had come into contact with a number of diseases, including tuberculosis, smallpox, and Paget’s disease.

By 1850, the graveyard was at bursting point and was completely overcharged with the dead. Because of health and safety fears, the graveyard was abandoned. Now owned by Transport for London, the Cross Bones Cemetery has developed into a place to respect outcasts dead or alive.