Reblogged from A Bit About Britain:

This is Cross Bones Graveyard, surely one of the saddest places in London.  Its story belongs within a wider narrative about poverty and prostitution, an important aspect of the two-thousand year history of the Borough of Southwark.  Just an unfashionable step from busy Bankside in Redcross Way, Cross Bones is part of a very old burial ground.  To be fair, it hasn’t seen better days for a long time.  In its earth lie the remains of an estimated 15,000 largely forgotten people, heaped one on the other, some probably barely 18 inches below the surface.  Cross Bones was in use up to 1853 when, being “completely overcharged with dead”, the cemetery was closed in the interests of public health and decency.

No one knows for sure when the first burial took place.  When Cross Bones was partially excavated in the 1990s during the course of works associated with the Jubilee underground line, Museum of London archaeologists removed 148 skeletons, more than 60% of them of children.  About a third of the skeletons were perinatal children – babies who were stillborn or who died shortly after birth.  The bones of all these individuals dated from around 1800 onward and generally exhibited signs of disease and ill-health, including smallpox, scurvy, rickets, osteoarthritis and syphilis, as well as healed fractures.  However, heartbreakingly poignant though this is, there is a tradition – but no proof – that Cross Bones has a much longer, and even murkier, past.  The Tudor historian John Stowe, in his 1598 Survey of London, mentions a cemetery for single women – a medieval euphemism for sex workers – who were excluded from Christian burial if they failed to mend their ways:

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