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

amalgamated parishes. But here, conditions were no better. The churchyards, the majority of which were controlled by the Church of England, were not big enough to cope with the number of dead. St Georges-in-the-East had three acres for a population of 40,000; St Matthew’s, Bethnal Green, two acres for morethan 70,000; St Mary’s, Whitechapel, had under an acre for nearly 35,000 people.
    Existing burial grounds included Cross Bones, an unconsecrated graveyard near Borough High Street, traditionally used for prostitutes, who were forbidden Christian burial. By the nineteenth century, Cross Bones was in the middle of one of the worst slums in London, choked with cholera victims–and a favourite with body-snatchers.
    In addition to existing burial grounds, new ones were founded as speculative ventures by entrepreneurs. These were either attached to existing churches and chapels, or created on plots purchased by developers. There were fourteen of these by 1835, including Spa Fields, Clerkenwell, which had started life as a tea-rooms but was then converted to the rather more profitable purpose of human burial; New Bunhill Fields, Islington; Victoria Park Cemetery, Bethnal Green at Cambridge Fields (five acres); and Sheen’s New Ground in Whitechapel (two acres). With the exception of the strictly-controlled Quaker and Jewish cemeteries, all these burial grounds were horribly congested. Charges for burial were cheaper than in churchyards, although services were not always conducted by ministers of religion. At Butler’s Burial Ground in south London, the gravedigger donned a surplice to read the burial service; at Globe Fields in Mile End, proceedings were conducted by an ex-cobbler. 6
    George Alfred Walker carried out a shocking survey of forty-seven overcrowded London burial grounds. In Gatherings from Graveyards (1839) ‘Walker of the Graveyards’ confessed himself astonished that ‘London, with its thousands of busy minds and observant eyes, anxiously exploring the dimly shadowed outlines of the future, should bear upon its breast these plague spots, the burial grounds.’ 7 Walker believed that dead bodies actually caused disease–attributing outbreaks of typhus and cholera directly to them.
    One of the most obscene examples chronicled by Walker was the site at Portugal Street, situated on St Clement’s Lane, off the Strand,and otherwise known as the ‘Green Ground’, although there was not a tree to be seen. ‘It was a mass of putrefaction.’ A ‘burying place beyond memory of man’, Portugal Street constituted a burial ground for a nearby workhouse, which was demolished to make way for King’s College Hospital in the 1830s. Several slaughterhouses in the vicinity contributed to the stench of decay. Upwards of 5,500 bodies were interred there between 1823 and 1848.
    ‘The soil of this ground is saturated, absolutely saturated, with human putrescence,’ Walker noted incisively. ‘The living here breathe on all sides an atmosphere impregnated with the odour of the dead.’ 8 The effluvia from Portugal Street were so offensive that people living in St Clement’s Lane were compelled to keep their windows closed. The walls of the Green Ground that adjoined the yards of local houses dripped with reeking fluid. Cholera, typhus and smallpox were rife.
    In the course of his investigations, Walker interviewed an unfortunate man living at 33 St Clement’s Lane. Clinically depressed and terminally ill, he lay in the back room of a filthy house, his wife and family at his bedside. Glancing out of the window, Walker saw an open grave within a few feet of the house. ‘That’s just been made for a poor fellow who died in the room upstairs,’ said the man. ‘He died of typhus fever, from which his wife has just recovered. They have kept him twelve days, and now they are going to put him under my nose, by way of a warning.’
    Children were the primary victims of these filthy conditions and there were numerous