London Urban Legends (16 page)

There may not be a plague pit stopping the construction of a tube line to Muswell Hill, but a graveyard did prevent the building of houses there. The Queen’s Wood was previously known as ‘Churchyard Bottom Wood’, being the site of an old church burial ground. In 1893 the Ecclesiastical Commissioners planned to sell off some of the wood for development, but local outrage prevented the building – which was sealed with the Highgate Woods Preservation Act of 1897 – going through parliament, allowing the wood’s preservation through purchase. There must be many stories like this to explain why a tube line travels a certain way. In reality the older tubes followed the road layout so they could avoid building foundations, basements and crypts, not plague pits. Legal considerations can also affect a tube tunnel’s direction. During the construction of the Fleet line, Transport for London set aside millions of pounds for dealing with lease holders who may not have been happy with a train running under their land.

The Pits

What of the suburban plague pits of Mortlake, Forest Hill, Camberwell, Muswell Hill and all the other sites? It is fair to say that when telling an urban legend, people never consider resources and logistics. With up to 4,000 people dying a day during the worst month of the Great Plague, Londoners did not have the time or energy to cart the wagons of the dead out into the countryside. Until the Great Plague, most plague victims were either buried in their local churchyards or in the grounds of the pest houses where plague sufferers had been confined. These pits are on the outskirts and edges of London (as it was then) and it would have been a huge waste of time and effort to drag the plague wagons out across the countryside to deposit the thousands of dead in Muswell Hill, Camberwell, Forest Hill, Blackheath and beyond. They had no need; the boundaries of the city at that point were on the edge of the City of London and Westminster, Wapping and Shadwell, which is where the dead were buried. In her book
Necropolis: London and Its Dead
, Catherine Arnold suggests that these legends sprung up after plague victims escaped London and wandered into the countryside of Camberwell and Forest Hill. The rural Surrey folk were familiar with what to do with infections, from their experience of murrain amongst their cattle, and the bodies of plague victims were dragged into holes by long poles and buried. The place of their burial, Arnold speculates, becomes a site of local lore.

People have dug up the dead. With London’s long and populous history it would be very strange if digging up the city did not disturb some of the dead. There are still clusters of bones across central London, and often when they are found, the first thought is always that a plague pit has been discovered. This was the belief when bones were dug up in the Main Quad of University College London in 2010. After examination, the 7,394 bone fragments, 6,773 of which were human, were discovered to have a different story. Many of the bones had been cut by saws and scalpels, and many had numbers written on them. The burial was not a fourteenth-century plague pit, but parts of bodies buried there 100 years ago. The date of their burial was traced through a large Bovril jar that was buried with them, and it became clear that they were anatomy specimens that had been disposed of in a pit.

In April 2011, tunnel digging for the new across-London Crossrail line dug up hundreds, if not thousands, of bodies next to Liverpool Street station. These were not plague victims but inmates of the original St Bethlehem Hospital, the asylum known as Bedlam, who were buried in the churchyard.

Folk-lore means that the soul is sane, but that the universe is wild and full of marvels. Realism means that the world is dull and full of routine, but that the soul is sick and screaming.

G.K. Chesterton

B
ETWEEN THE TUNNELS
used by amorous and criminal historical figures, and the legends set within the London Underground, are other tales of underground London. The city is so honeycombed with basements, nuclear bunkers and tunnels that it must often ring hollow beneath the feet of its inhabitants. The unseen world is one full of allure, and a natural habitat for secrets.

The Secret of the Elephant and Castle

Waiting for a bus at the Elephant and Castle on a cold and rainy night must be one of the unspoken rites of passage of contemporary London, like seeing a cast member of
EastEnders
in the West End or realising that something being ‘pop-up’ doesn’t automatically make it exciting. The asymmetrical jumble of the Elephant and Castle shopping centre, all dirty glass and faded pink plastic, is a strange, sometimes fascinating place. Was it really thought that putting it there would improve the area and the lives of those that inhabit it? ‘No’, according to writer Nigel Pennick, who believes that the shopping centre was constructed in the 1960s as a cover. In the 1940s an extension of the Jubilee line down to Camberwell Green was planned, before losing out in 1961 to the Victoria line running to Brixton. A mile or so of tunnel was dug and then abandoned, but not without an anarchist group noticing and describing it in their pamphlet
London – The Other Underground
as a ‘government tunnel’ linked via other secret passages to the City and Victoria. Pennick decided that during the 1950s, with the chill of the Cold War and fear of nuclear war in the air, these tunnels were converted into nuclear shelters, suggesting that many 1960s redevelopments were a cover for the construction of secret government bunkers. How does one cover up a secret underground government bunker near to Westminster but beneath a disreputable part of south London? You build a giant shopping centre as a cover and hope anarchists and authors do not notice. And that, some say, is why the Elephant and Castle shopping centre is there.

There are people that think that the government still has the power to have secret tunnels and sites across London, and there are endless rumours of a secret tube line for ferrying the Royal Family out of Buckingham Palace in the event of an attack or disaster. These are not new rumours; in 1914 a discussion on the drainage tunnels that run under Greenwich Park gave them the more heroic role of being a possible escape tunnel for Henry VIII, their kinks and bends there to perturb arrows that may be chasing the king as he squeezed down them. Another royal escape route is through the trees in St James’s Park. They were arranged during the Second World War, somehow, to ensure that a light aircraft could land in the park to whisk the Royal Family out of Buckingham Palace should Germany successfully invade. This is what I was told by a friend in the Hermit’s Cave in Camberwell anyway, but the friend who told me is a bit of a trickster – we were there to discuss his role in the Brentford Griffin hoax.

The MI6 building, Vauxhall Cross, on the south bank of the Thames, has a tunnel running from its basement to Vauxhall station, but in greater dangers it is rumoured that the building has a more drastic self-defence mechanism. Folklorist Martin Goodson found himself on the No. 36 bus going from Peckham to Camberwell and overheard three Camberwell art students talking:

You know that in case of emergency I’ve heard that it (MI5 building) [actually MI6], can sink down and go under the river.’

General hilarity broke out from the other students.

‘No, it’s true, it can. I’ve also heard it can turn black so that it cannot be attacked at night.

The level of hilarity increased, but the student persevered in her conviction that this building is now equipped with some spectacular special effect qualities to protect itself in case of attack.

I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening;
I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.

Aleister Crowley, The Book of Lies

Dead Line