Mass graves didn’t re-route the London Underground
Forget recent horror flicks “Creep” and “The Midnight Meat Train”, getting trapped in the London Underground late at night just got a whole lot scarier. Wherever you go in London, you’re likely to be walking above some grave or another: the city, as the author of “Necropolis: London and its Dead” Catherine Walker recently pointed out, is essentially one giant burial ground. But if you happen to be riding the London Underground, be aware that during your commute you’re likely to be skirting past thousands upon thousands of human remains.
The idea that the dead had a say in the design of the underground is, however, a myth. The most common anecdote is that between the stations of Knightsbridge and South Kensington, the underground line curves to circumvent an enormous plague pit hidden beneath Hyde Park. Filling this pit are the remains of thousands of victims of the Great Plague (1665 – 1666), hurriedly thrown in by friends, family, or strangers all desperately hoping they wouldn’t soon be following behind.
The decision was made to go around Hyde Park rather than drill through (or rather 40 – 80 feet under) the remains there. But it wasn’t because the plague pit that underlies Hyde Park is such a densely packed impermeable mass of twisted, tangled human bones that, even with the tools at their disposal in the nineteenth century, the workmen simply couldn’t drill through. It was because, where possible, line planners decided to follow the course of publicly owned roads–Brompton Road in this case—so as to avoid the risk of undermining housing foundations.
This isn’t to say that those working on the lines over the last couple of centuries haven’t come across human remains. Alan Jackson, in his detailed documentation of route digging between Paddington and King’s Cross in 1862, stumbled across the remains of past Londoners. Rather than an impenetrable wall, however, it was a small enough number that he could call the London Necropolis Company (<people apparently died to work there>) and have them removed.