Bedlam’s Big Dig

The construction of a new underground commuter line has allowed archeologists to excavate Londons first municipal graveyard.
The construction of a new underground commuter line has allowed archeologists to excavate London’s first municipal graveyard.Photograph by JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP/Getty

The digging of Crossrail, London’s new twenty-three-billion-dollar east-west underground commuter line, has been one long party for archeologists. Since construction began, in 2009, imposing encampments, clad in blue fencing and busy with trucks, have appeared across the city, providing access points for the cranes and the huge boring machines that are needed to carve out tunnels, vents, and stations along the line’s seventy-three miles. Almost always, there have also been archeologists on the scene, clipboards and trowels in hand, to see what can be unearthed from the briefly exposed soil. So far, there have been excavations at thirty of Crossrail’s forty building sites, yielding up a section of a medieval barge, in Canning Town; a Bronze Age wooden walkway, in Plumstead; and the remains of a Mesolithic campfire, in North Woolwich.

On a recent, gray spring afternoon, I went to see the latest, and largest, Crossrail dig, across the road from Liverpool Street station, in the middle of the financial district, where a new ticket hall will soon occupy the space previously filled by London’s first municipal graveyard. The New Churchyard, an acre in size, was first used in 1569, not long after an outbreak of bubonic plague, as an alternative to the overcrowded parish plots inside the old city walls. It was not attached to any church, which made it a natural resting place for radicals, nonconformists, migrants, mad people, and drifters—Londoners, in other words. It closed some time in the seventeen-twenties, full many times over. Ten thousand people were buried there; in 1984, a partial excavation found graves dug through graves, eight skeletons per cubic metre.

“There is a lot of death here in Liverpool Street,” Jay Carver, Crossrail’s lead archeologist, said as we looked down from a platform over the site. “A lot of dead people.” Below us, thirty archeologists in bright-orange coveralls and red hard hats were squatting and picking over brown skulls and tangled spines in the mud. In the nineteenth century, two railway stations (which later merged into one) were built on the other side of the street, on the remains of a Roman cemetery containing five thousand skeletons. A few hundred yards away, in Spitalfields, more than ten thousand medieval remains were dug up between 1990 and 2007, the apparent victims of a volcanic eruption, in 1258, that disrupted the climate and harvests. “Scarcely a small rare flower or shooting germ appeared,” Henry de Knyghton, a priest at the time, wrote. “The pestilence was immense—insufferable.” Back then, the land in this part of London lay north of the city walls. It was full of gardens and streams and marshes, a logical place for graveyards.

The neighborhood retained its morbidity into modern times. During the First World War, Liverpool Street station was hit during a raid by German bombers. A passenger train on platform nine, heading for Hunstanton, in Norfolk, was struck, and thirteen people died. In 1938, the station became the receiving point for the ten thousand Jewish children who escaped Nazi-occupied Europe on the Kindertransport, travelling ahead of the Holocaust. As the station’s twin Victorian structures, labyrinthine and soot-stained, fell into disrepair in the second half of the twentieth century, they came to evoke a huge sadness. “Liverpool Street is menacing and metaphysical and vast,” Iris Murdoch wrote in her 1975 novel “A Word Child.” Austerlitz, the hero of W. G. Sebald’s novel of the same name, who has grown up with no idea that he was a child of the Kindertransport, has his moment of revelation in the disused ladies’ waiting room of the old station: “I felt at this time as if the dead were returning from their exile and filling the twilight around me with their strangely slow but incessant to-ing and fro-ing.”

The excavation site, which was about the size of a tennis court, was floodlit and roofed in white tarpaulin. To keep up with Crossrail’s construction schedule, Carver had his archeologists working in two shifts, from seven in the morning until eleven at night. The plan was to dig through four layers of time: the Georgian and Victorian periods, when houses were built on the cemetery; below that, the years of the burial ground; then the medieval period, when the land was flooded and marshy; and, at the bottom, the Roman period, six metres below street level, where Carver’s team had found horseshoes (more properly, hipposandals), doors, and the remains of an engineered road.

Since early March, the focus has been on the bodies. So far, eighteen hundred have been retrieved; Carver believes that a total of three thousand lie in this corner of the cemetery. “For the city of that period, it is a unique sample,” he said. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, London’s population, powered by immigration, was growing and changing quickly. (The city’s death rate was higher than its birth rate.) The years of the New Churchyard are thick with stories. Margaret Clark, who was buried there on February 17, 1683, at the age of eighty, lived through the Gunpowder Plot, the English Civil War, London’s Great Plague of 1665, the Great Fire of 1666, and the arrival of tea; she was a contemporary of William Shakespeare, Oliver Cromwell, and Isaac Newton. But archeologists like facts that they can hold in their hands—data from a genome. Carver wants to know whether there were Africans, Asians, even New World visitors walking London’s streets four centuries ago. He wants to know what they were drinking and smoking. (Carver and his team have uncovered two samples of hair, which can be tested for isotopes.) From the remains of the plague victims of 1665—the New Churchyard contains several mass graves—scientists hope to glean the reason that the pathogen never struck the British Isles again. “It is a reservoir of information,” Carver said.

Most of the skeletons will remain nameless. Of those excavated so far, only two have been found with slabs that hold their name and date of burial. Crossrail has enlisted volunteers to trawl through London’s parish records; the effort has turned up more than five thousand names of the dead (“1st October 1583, Richard Wyttor, bachelor and grosser, died of a burning jaw”), but matching these to the bones is another matter. The New Churchyard was also called Bedlam burial ground, because it was built on land belonging to the Bethlem Royal Hospital (commonly known as Bedlam), Europe’s first insane asylum, but identifying any inmates will be all but impossible.

The two individuals whom Carver is keenest to find, assuming that they were not buried in another part of the cemetery, are John Lilburne, a.k.a. Freeborn John, the founder of the Civil War’s Leveller movement and a beloved figure among British radicals to this day, and Robert Lockyer, a younger comrade who was executed, on Cromwell’s orders, after raising a mutiny in Bishopsgate in April of 1649. Freeborn John dedicated his life to what he called “the middle sort of people”—“the hobnails, clouted shoes, the private soldiers, the leather and woollen aprons and the laborious and industrious people of England.” He died of a fever, in Kent, in 1657, and was brought to the New Churchyard to be buried. Carver expects Lockyer to be easier to find. “Robert was shot by firing squad, so he should be really obvious,” he said.

Carver grew up on archeological digs; his father is an emeritus professor of archeology at the University of York and an expert on vanished Saxon towns. Carver’s main job on the Crossrail project is to make sure that the archeology is carried out properly and on time—to keep the show on the road. Still, he is as excited as if he were digging himself. “Every day on a site like this is exhilarating,” he said. “New discoveries are coming out every moment.” At three o’clock, we watched a shift change. Thirty more archeologists—contractors from the Museum of London, with ponytails, beards, and master’s degrees from Spain, Poland, and Italy—trooped onto the site, received handover briefings, and kneeled or squatted next to the bones. Londoners dug up other Londoners. Once the skeletons have been bagged, cleaned, and examined by osteologists at a laboratory in Islington, they will be reburied near the mouth of the Thames Estuary, on Canvey Island, in Essex. Carver is determined to make sure that, when Crossrail is finished, there will be a plaque in their memory. “We are hoping that everyone who walks down here will know that it was here,” he said.