Last year sometime I recall catching a snippet of something on TV about a place called Cross Bones Graveyard. I wanted to find out more, so today after a quick look on Google Maps and realising that I work just a few streets away, I paid a visit to the site during my lunch break...
Cross Bones Graveyard was in medieval times an unconsecrated graveyard for 'single women' or 'Winchester Geese', the prostitutes licensed by the Bishop of Winchester to ply their trade in Southwark. By the 18th century it had become a pauper's burial ground for the people living in the slums around Bankside. It was closed in 1853, described as being 'completely overcharged with dead'. In the 1990s, London Underground dug up part of the site during the Jubilee Line Extension, removing 148 skeletons. The Museum of London estimates the site contains an estimated 15,000 bodies, making it one of the largest graveyards in London.
For more than a decade, Friends of Cross Bones have worked to influence the site owners, Transport for London (TfL), to rededicate part of the site as a Garden of Remembrance.
You can read further information here;
www.crossbones.org.uk
The more I read and research into the Cross Bones Graveyard, the more I'm discovering what this part of London; Bankside and Borough was like during that time; a dark and seedy place one of brothels and theaters, slums and prisons, completely different from the Bankside of today. If you have an hour to spare, THIS BBC documentary provides a fascinating albeit grim insight to what the life of someone who was buried here in the mid 1800s may have been like.
Every night and every morn,
Some to misery are born,
Every morn and every night,
Some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.
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