Saturday, 16 March 2013

Bubonic Plague, Black Death and Crossrail


Recently Sam Pfizenmaier of Museum of London Archaeology has been leading the excavation of a burial ground started as a Black Death cemetery outside of St Bart's Hospital at the London Charterhouse, funded by Crossrail as part of the required engineered route of new rail tunnels




The land for the Charterhouse, at Spital Croft,  was rented as a cemetery from St Bartholomew's in 1348. A chapel and hermitage was constructed there, and this became a Carthusian priory later in the century (the "Charterhouse"). The cemetery has remained as open land, whilst the Priory was forcibly dissolved (the Prior hung drawn and quartered - and his arm nailed to the door - whilst fellow Carthusians died on the scaffold or starved to death in Newgate Prison. The Charterhouse became a Tudor courtyard mansion after much modification, and graveyard remained open space as "the green".
File:A View of the Charter House Taken from the Green 1813.jpg
Charterhouse from the Green in 1813

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From 1611, the Charterouse was endowed as a charity by the legacy of it's then owner - who owned coal mines near Newcastle - and since then has been run as a school and an almshouse. Later "Brethren" (almshouse dwellers, musicians, businessmen, etc) are buried at the former Bow Cemetery (now Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park), in 8 burials per grave. This is a higher density than the burials in the original Plague Cemetery.

Charterhouse Brethren graves
click for more info and location

London Landscape Observer: Bubonic Plague from Black Death victims in the Eas...: In 1985, I excavated the first plague pit to be recognised on Spital Square excavations. It started with me recognising two skeletons onoother, one buried face up, the other face down. And then I recognised the other skeletons in the group, all intact and with the outer skeletons slightly bent to the sides of a square pit. Now skeletons from Spitalfields and "East Smithfield" (the Mint) may have yielded DNA confirming that Bubonic Plague was the cause of Black Death.
Spitalfields - the historic name for the area of which Spital Square is just a part - is a corruption of Hospital Fields and is named after the hospital of St Mary without (outside) Bishopsgate, which lay to the east of the main road north leading out of the City of London. It was later built over and became an immigrant suburb. It was characteristically "East End" of London, with markets and low wage jobs. The Corporation of the City of London built a new wholesale market there (markets had been held there since the 17th century http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Spitalfields_Market ). This displaced residents for whom the Corporation built the flats I live in  
http://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/Corporation/LGNL_Services/Housing/Council_housing/Housing_estates/dron.htm  . The area is still a hotspot for a modern plague, tuberculosis, with 60.5 cases per 100,000 in 2009 compared with 15 per 100,000 in England as a whole Tower Hamlets Factsheet . It always was a hotspot for the disease and Heliotherapy was pioneered at the Royal London Hospital (who treated king George V with it in 1928). My Grandparents, Bernard and Elizabeth Sefton, osteopaths from the 1930s, used ultra-violet lamps in their practice, they did not cure, but did control their daughter, my auntie Olive's TB gland in her neck. A neighbour and colleague was greatly weakened by tuberculosis, which contributed to his death in the 1980s. People and Landscape....

(Y. pestis is a recently evolved descendent of the soil-dwelling bacillus Yersinia pseudotuberculosis)

Saturday, 2 March 2013

The Art of the Underground: 150 Years of Re-designing London


The Art of the Underground: 150 Years of Re-designing London

A lecture by...

Research Fellow, the London Transport Museum. Oliver Green's two most recent books are Underground: How the Tube Shaped London (2012, Allen Lane) and The Tube...
FROM http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/the-art-of-the-underground-150-years-of-re-designing-london (with grateful thanks)
Museum of London

Overview

The London Underground today is one of the world’s largest and busiest urban metros. Exactly 150 years ago, on 9 January 1863, when the inaugural train left Paddington for Farringdon with invited guests, the Metropolitan Railway was hailed as an amazing pioneer. A public service began on the following day and the Daily News announced dramatically that ‘for the first time in the history of the world, men can ride in pleasant carriages, and with considerable comfort, lower down than gas pipes and water pipes…lower than the graveyards’.
The Victorian steam underground, less than four miles long with just six stations, has developed into a modern electric system covering more than 250 route miles and serving 270 stations. Last year there were over one billion passenger journeys on the Tube, more than the total for the entire UK national rail network, and the numbers keep growing. Londoners have always grumbled about it, but they could not do without it. The Underground keeps London going.
This talk looks at how this has happened and why the Underground is now the city’s greatest asset, underpinning everything else. Our Tube has shaped the capital and its development over 150 years, and rail transport will be the key to London’s future.

Listen to the lecture