London Urban Legends (15 page)

Blackheath is an open windy space above Greenwich. Despite greater London enveloping all sides of the heath, it does still have a desolate beauty. Houses cluster all along the edge of the hill Blackheath sits on but they avoid the top of it because, according to lore, Blackheath gets its name from being a plague pit for Black Death victims, just as Mortlake is the lake of death. In his book
And Did Those Feet: Walking Through 2000 Years of British and Irish History
, Charlie Connolly, remembers: ‘I grew up in Blackheath in south London, to the casual observer just a great big expanse of grass sliced by a couple of roads. Yet it was a plague pit: during the Great Plague of 1665-6, hundreds of bodies were thrown into pits, scattered with lime and buried.’

Connolly demonstrates part of the attraction to plague pit urban legends here: that the storyteller has hidden knowledge they can share. He can lift the veil from an everyday piece of waste ground or greenery and describe the horror and history behind it. There is a dark glamour there.

On 7 April 2002, Blackheath Hill collapsed with a huge hole appearing across the A2 road so severe it took two years to repair. Remembering the event, a writer on the Tube Professionals Rumour Network website wrote that there was a ‘big fuss’ as Blackheath is ‘another plague pit’. The fuss about the big hole in the A2 was really about the big hole running across a major road. What had collapsed was not a burial pit but the cavern that runs underneath Blackheath and Blackheath Hill. Discovered in 1780, these connecting caverns are thought to be chalk pits or hiding places dug by locals during the Danish wars. They run along and under Blackheath Hill from Maidstone Hill. They are known as ‘Jack Cade’s Cavern’ in local lore, as it is thought the rebel leader Jack Cade hid in them to escape oppressive soldiers. Tours were given from 1850 and, after chandeliers were installed, balls were held in the caverns. They were abandoned in 1853 after a panic, when the lights went out. The caverns were next investigated in 1938 as a possible air-raid shelter. They were found unsuitable and were again sealed and forgotten about until the A2 caved in.

Blackheath is not a plague pit, its name being in use since at least the twelfth century, more than 500 years before the Black Death arrived in Britain. ‘Blackheath’ is thought to have come from the dark colour of its soil or have evolved from its description as a bleak heath. People are very fond of digging on the heath: as well as whoever dug the chalk pits, Blackheath, like much common land, was used by locals to dig gravel. After the Second World War these gravel pits were used to bury rubble from the Blitz which were then grassed over, causing the heath to lose its rugged, gorse-covered appearance and become the grassy flat space we know today.

The part of Blackheath that survived being built on – much of it didn’t – was not because of the dead beneath it, but the living defending their piece of land from enclosure and development.

History being the weird, vast and diverse thing it is, of course, I will have to confess to you that there may still be a burial pit on Blackheath. Between 300-2,000 Cornishmen are in a mass grave somewhere on the heath. These men did not die as victims of the plague, but were killed by soldiers. They were camped up on Blackheath in 1497 on a march to London to protest against the taxes levied by King Henry VII to finance his war with Scotland. Henry sent in the troops and the Cornish rebels got no further than the heath. Local lore speculates that their bodies are buried beneath a mound called Whitfield’s Mount. This may or may not be true.

The vast majority of burials in London are not related to the Black Death. However, the idea of the mass, unmarked pits still has such a hold over some imaginations that when we are hurtling through underground London it is always plague victims that keep us company down there.

Green Park

I have found little written down about London’s plague pits outside of repeated pieces of urban legends and the odd ominous nod toward a plague pit in the countless ‘Haunted London’ and ‘Ghosts of London’ books. Ghost books will use anything, like any good story-spinner, to set the right atmosphere for their tale. So the stories of the London Underground tunnel meeting a plague pit is in little threads across books, the internet and folklore. One of the clearer stories has already been quoted: the tunnelling of the Victoria line that disturbed a plague pit, while others say that the Jubilee line had to be redirected around a pit under the park.

It is a sign of the poisoned ground of Green Park that flowers will not grow there and, like Blackheath, has a sense of bleakness about it made all the stranger and unsettling for its location in the centre of London. Peter Underwood described Green Park’s ‘stillness, an air of expectancy, and a sensation of sadness’ in his book
Haunted London
and James Clark mentions the park’s ‘subdued atmosphere’ in his London ghost book, also called
Haunted London
.

There may well be diseased bodies under the turf of the park, but they are not plague victims. Before the Reformation, the site of St James’s Palace was a leper hospital; and this part of its history may have informed the plague myths of the park. The Victoria line, being the first deep tunnel line on the London Underground, does not see daylight at any point. This may also have stoked fears regarding what was down in the earth with the commuters. This has always been a fear related to subterranean travel: when an underground train line was first proposed for London, Dr Cuming held an open-air meeting at Smithfield preaching the apocalypse: ‘The forth-coming end of the world would be hastened by the construction of underground railways burrowing into the infernal regions and thereby disturbing the devil.’

King Edward I granted the leper hospital the right to finance itself with an annual May Fair, so giving Mayfair, now one of London’s richest areas, its name from an annual charity festival for lepers. Green Park is the former grounds of this London leper colony. Henry VIII, during his marriage to Anne Boleyn, claimed the site for the Crown and St James’s Palace was built on the site of the hospital. The grounds were transformed into St James’s Park, with the neighbouring ground called Upper St James’s Park. However, this very ground (now known as Green Park) bears the mark of its history – flowers will not grow there. There are many theories as to why this is: flowers will not grow there because of the sad virgin leper girls buried beneath it; or perhaps it is because when the hospital was taken by the Crown, Henry VIII had the nuns of the hospital thrown onto the snowy ground of what is now the park. Some believe that there are no flowers in Green Park to mark heaven’s displeasure with this cruel story from the Reformation. The irony is, that according to
Old and New London
, the leper hospital at St James’s Park London was struck by the plague, which moved quicker than leprosy to take some of the inhabitants. None of this pestilent history has really affected the ground of Green Park however, because despite the lack of formal beds and gardens, narcissus flowers do bloom in Green Park in the spring.

Down in the Ground
Where the Dead Men Go

Contacting the Transport for London Corporate Archives, I was told that there are no specific references to plague pits in their records. They had just been through their archive to mark the 150-year anniversary of the London Underground and nothing came up. I wanted to make sure – plague pits really are everywhere in London lore – so I went through the files on the planning and construction of the Victoria line and the Fleet line, which became the Jubilee line, under Green Park.

The digging of the Victoria line is described in some detail in a pamphlet which was given away free when it opened. Miners were employed to work a digging shield that churned through the earth, and then reinforced the tunnels with concrete or steel supports. It must have been uncomfortable and claustrophobic and if they had met with bodies down there, it would have been just as unpleasant as the urban legend describes.

There were no references in the archives to this work uncovering dead bodies. The nearest possible reference I found to the plague was a note stating that there would always be the disinfectant Dettol with the workers constructing the Fleet line.

The plague pits of London are not lost and are not waiting to vomit up the dead onto unsuspecting builders and tunnel diggers. They are mostly well-mapped and their reality is every bit as unsettling and surprising as the urban myths. The mass graves were mainly dug for plague victims during the hottest, highest point of the Great Plague in August 1665. Before then, victims were buried in churchyards or in the grounds of pest houses (specially contained homes for isolating plague sufferers). Carnaby Street is near the sites of two seventeenth-century burial grounds for St James’s workhouse. These sites, full and closed by 1733, may have been used as plague pits in the swinging 1660s. Carnaby Street has also been reported as the site of a pest house, the gardens of which extend out across Golden Square and Wardour Street. Maitland, in his
History of London
, reported that ‘some thousands of corpses were buried that died of that dreadful and virulent contagion’.

Beneath the green grass of Charterhouse Square lies part of three pits which dealt with many of the dead. The oldest part, used in 1349, covers the area between Great Sutton Street and Clerkenwell Road. It was known as No-Man’s-Land when purchased by the Bishops of London for burying plague victims. The site runs from Clerkenwell Road down to Charterhouse and then into the top of Smithfield. The pits contain an estimated 10,000 bodies. Charterhouse Square has its own plague legend: apparently the schoolboys of Charterhouse School would dare each other to crawl across the square at midnight, when the groans and cries of the dead below could be heard.

The Devonshire Square development in the City is built on a pit once dug into a green field at the upper end of Hand Alley, according to Defoe, as was Hollywell Mount in Shoreditch, which is now a car park. Liverpool Street station and the Broadgate Estate are built on a pit open from 1569 until 1720, which was used for plague victims and other burials. There are two plague pits in the grounds of St Paul’s Church, Shadwell; a pest-field (where plague victims were buried in large numbers) in the ‘additional ground’ of St John’s Church Wapping, Whitechapel, had three pits, and St Bride’s, off Fleet Street, had a pit which was closed halfway through the 1665 Great Plague. This may be why St Bride’s sits so high above the ground. Marsham Street, Horseferry Road and Vincent Street cover a pit which was once part of Tothill Fields in Westminster, Golden Square and the multi-storey Soho car park on Poland Street. Famously, Bunhill Fields, just on the outskirts of the City, was another pit. The ‘great plague pit in Finsbury’ is under a car park and residential gardens for flats on the corner of Seward Street and Mount Mill. Lille Street Mansions, Normand Park and Fulham Swimming Pool sit on the site of the Lillie Road Pest Field.