Free Necropolis: London & it's Dead by Catharine Arnold Page A

for employment, was rocked by a series of epidemics. The high infant death-rate and constant epidemics of cholera, typhoid, measles and smallpox meant that death was always present. No wonder that, according to historian Vanessa Harding, Londoners spent three million pounds a year on gin!
    However, 1842 was a significant year, as it finally saw the Government recognize the scale of the problem of what to do with the dead. A Select Committee was appointed to investigate the capital’s noxious and overcrowded burial grounds, but this only came about after a series of scandals, a wave of cholera epidemics and a long campaign by public health reformers Sir Edwin Chadwick and George Alfred Walker. Chadwick, a barrister and radical journalist, and Walker, an eminent surgeon, were pioneers who battled long and hard to improve the parlous state of things.
    Graves were being crowded out by developers. City churches, with their old-world churchyards, were wedged in between huge modern office blocks, public buildings and railway stations. In a city where building land was at a premium, London was faced with a lack of burial space. Sir Edwin Chadwick, whose Sanitary Report proved to be a bestseller for the Stationery Office in 1842, confirmed that, every year, 20,000 adults and 30,000 youths and children were ‘imperfectly interred’ in less than 218 acres of burial ground, ‘closely surrounded by the abodes of the living’. 2
    Available burial grounds fell into three categories: existing churches with their churchyards, stand-alone churchyards, and new developments. The satirical magazine Punch , at that period closer in spirit to today’s Private Eye, editorialized that: ‘A London churchyard is very like a London omnibus. It can be made to carry any number.’ 3 St Mary’s Churchyard, Islington, for example, was notoriously overcrowded. In 1835, Thomas Cromwell wrote that conditions were so bad it was necessary to remove the oldest tombstones to make way for the new. An engraving by Daniel Warner dating from the 1840s depicts it as jam-packed with looming mausolea rammed in among gravestones leaning at precarious angles. 4
    Despite the reservations of Wren, Vanbrugh and their successors, burial in vaults beneath churches had continued. The processes of decomposition, shaky foundations and the British disease of rising damp caused particular difficulties. Chadwick noted that, however solid the coffin, ‘Sooner or later every corpse buried in the vault of a church spreads the products of decomposition through the air which is breathed, as readily as if it had never been enclosed.’
    One example was the Rector’s Vault beneath St Clement Dane’s Church on the Strand, the entrance into which was in the aisle of the church, near the Communion table. When opened, the smell of decomposing flesh was so intense that lighted candles, passed through the opening into the vault, were instantly extinguished. Workmen were understandably reluctant to descend into the vault until it had been aired for two or three days.
    One of the duties of a sexton consisted of ‘tapping’ coffins, ‘so as to facilitate the escape of gases which would otherwise detonate from their confinement’. 5 On occasion, the build-up of corpse gas was so intense that coffins actually exploded. In the 1800s, fires beneath St Clement Dane’s and Wren’s Church of St James’s in Jermyn Street destroyed many bodies and burned for days.
    As well as fire, water was another problem. There had been a well to the east of St Clement Dane’s, sunk in 1807, but the water became so offensive, probably as result of the infiltration of the products of human putrefaction, that it was bricked up. The water table had risen, with springs so close to the surface that coffins sank into a watery grave as soon as they were let down.
    Churchyards where the churches had been destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666 but had never been rebuilt were used as burial grounds for the