itself to the statue. This may have been unconscious, as folklore, or conscious, by attaching an older myth to a new object. That statues move like megaliths has also made its way to Bloomsbury, where a recent tale emerged about the stone lions sitting outside the north entrance of the British Museum. Be there at midnight and you will see them stand up and stretch. Ideas are more durable than stone: even before statues wear away, their meaning can become lost and confused but ideas can breed and evolve amongst human humour, wit, error and fear, and can travel in the breath and letters of everyone.
11
PLAGUE PITS
----
The Black Death has entered London’s folk memory as a founding urban myth; every pothole in the road, every bump in a tube journey, every square or roundabout seems to have a plague story attached to it.
Richard Barnett, Sick City: Two Thousand Years
of Life and Death In London
----
W HEN I FIRST moved to the capital I lived in south-west London. I was told that nearby Mortlake had gained its name from the time of the Great Plague. The bodies of plague victims had been sunk into the lake which, forever more, was known as ‘The Lake of the Dead’: Mort-lake. I was not the only new arrival to London to hear about the city’s burial sites for plague victims. A friend fresh from the north west of England and new to south-east London was told that she would need inoculating before going up to the giant plague pit that is Blackheath. Even after decades here it feels like a step cannot be taken in London without crushing someone’s bones, and a journey cannot be made without passing by, or through, a plague pit.
Clear pieces of land in the overcrowded city are thought to be where plague pits sit and seethe in the landscape. A work colleague and I were discussing this, and he told me that the ‘small green on Caledonian Road and Wynford Street is on the site of a plague pit. That’s why it was never built on.’ He was told this in the early 1970s when he started a job in that area.
These mass graves are too dangerous to dig into or build over; infection may be lurking beneath the soil waiting for fresh air and a fresh chance to infect people. I read on a web forum that if there is an oval bulging out of an otherwise straight alley behind a line of Victorian houses, it is because there is a plague pit there. These could be seen on maps of nineteenth-century Tottenham, Stoke Newington and Islington before twentieth-century developers blundered over them.
Mount Pond on Clapham Common is a plague pit, as is the triangular piece of land where Champion Hill meets Denmark Hill in Camberwell. Horniman Triangle, the field opposite the Horniman Museum, is a plague pit. The roundabout on the corner of Gypsy Hill and Allen Park is a pit. In Norbury in the 1980s there was a protest against plans to put storage containers on a piece of land thought to be a plague pit.
They are not just a suburban danger, however. In his book Underground London: Travels Beneath the City Streets , Stephen Smith mentions that the Harvey Nichols basement menswear department has a low ceiling as the building cannot be dug any deeper into the ground, for fear of disturbing a pit. In the 1970s and ’80s the London Folklore Group’s newsletter, London Lore , told of an international bank with an office in the City on Gracechurch Street whose employees thought it was built over the graves of plague victims. The building had its own water supply, which some of the workers in the bank would refuse to drink for fear of infection.
The London Underground has to curve around, drop under or plough straight through the assembled subterranean plague victims previously left in peace. The 1972 Reader’s Digest book Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain lists a tale about the Bakerloo line whilst on the way to St John’s Wood from Baker Street. This is now part of the Jubilee line. There is a point between the stations where the ears of
11
PLAGUE PITS
----
The Black Death has entered London’s folk memory as a founding urban myth; every pothole in the road, every bump in a tube journey, every square or roundabout seems to have a plague story attached to it.
Richard Barnett, Sick City: Two Thousand Years
of Life and Death In London
----
W HEN I FIRST moved to the capital I lived in south-west London. I was told that nearby Mortlake had gained its name from the time of the Great Plague. The bodies of plague victims had been sunk into the lake which, forever more, was known as ‘The Lake of the Dead’: Mort-lake. I was not the only new arrival to London to hear about the city’s burial sites for plague victims. A friend fresh from the north west of England and new to south-east London was told that she would need inoculating before going up to the giant plague pit that is Blackheath. Even after decades here it feels like a step cannot be taken in London without crushing someone’s bones, and a journey cannot be made without passing by, or through, a plague pit.
Clear pieces of land in the overcrowded city are thought to be where plague pits sit and seethe in the landscape. A work colleague and I were discussing this, and he told me that the ‘small green on Caledonian Road and Wynford Street is on the site of a plague pit. That’s why it was never built on.’ He was told this in the early 1970s when he started a job in that area.
These mass graves are too dangerous to dig into or build over; infection may be lurking beneath the soil waiting for fresh air and a fresh chance to infect people. I read on a web forum that if there is an oval bulging out of an otherwise straight alley behind a line of Victorian houses, it is because there is a plague pit there. These could be seen on maps of nineteenth-century Tottenham, Stoke Newington and Islington before twentieth-century developers blundered over them.
Mount Pond on Clapham Common is a plague pit, as is the triangular piece of land where Champion Hill meets Denmark Hill in Camberwell. Horniman Triangle, the field opposite the Horniman Museum, is a plague pit. The roundabout on the corner of Gypsy Hill and Allen Park is a pit. In Norbury in the 1980s there was a protest against plans to put storage containers on a piece of land thought to be a plague pit.
They are not just a suburban danger, however. In his book Underground London: Travels Beneath the City Streets , Stephen Smith mentions that the Harvey Nichols basement menswear department has a low ceiling as the building cannot be dug any deeper into the ground, for fear of disturbing a pit. In the 1970s and ’80s the London Folklore Group’s newsletter, London Lore , told of an international bank with an office in the City on Gracechurch Street whose employees thought it was built over the graves of plague victims. The building had its own water supply, which some of the workers in the bank would refuse to drink for fear of infection.
The London Underground has to curve around, drop under or plough straight through the assembled subterranean plague victims previously left in peace. The 1972 Reader’s Digest book Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain lists a tale about the Bakerloo line whilst on the way to St John’s Wood from Baker Street. This is now part of the Jubilee line. There is a point between the stations where the ears of
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