gruesome truth about plague pits and the Tube
When the bubonic plague broke out in London in 1665, it wasn the first time the disease canada goose outlet store quebec terrified the city. But it was one of the cheap canada goose deadliest outbreaks that the city had ever seen and, possibly, the most infamous.
It long been thought that there might be victims of that crippling epidemic buried underneath London under and alongside the trains people use every day.
The plague wiped out a great deal of 17th century Britain. In London, it thought that fatalities reached up to 100,000, roughly one fifth of the population. Popular accounts of the epidemic described its horror in detail. canada goose outlet new york And they described the mass graves, known as pits which are said to have gouged land across the city. Hundreds of bodies were said to canada goose outlet vancouver have been hastily buried in these pits without coffins, care or ceremony.
Two hundred years later, London opened its first underground railway the world first in 1863. By the century close, a spider web of track linked stations as far as Shepherd Bush and Bank, Hammersmith and Mansion House.
canada goose black friday sale If you look at these early routes, you notice something odd: They don take the straightest, fastest line from point A to B. Instead, they meander. They curve. Almost like they avoiding something. canada goose black friday sale
Canada Goose Outlet View image of This map from 1938 shows London’s early Underground Canada Goose Outlet
uk canada goose It didn take long to put two and two together. When engineers went to design these underground railroads, the story goes, they tried to avoid plague pits either because they canada goose coats uk didn want to disturb the dead, or because the bodies were packed too thickly to bore through. uk canada goose
[Tube train lines] meander. They curve. Almost like they avoiding something.
Various resources hold that there are a number of places where engineers hit bodies or tried to avoid them. Catharine Arnold, in her 2006 book Necropolis: London and Its Dead, writes: the spot where Brompton Road and Knightsbridge now meet, excavations for the Piccadilly Line between Knightsbridge and South Kensington Underground stations unearthed a pit canada goose outlet new york city so dense with human remains that it could not be tunnelled through. This is said to account for the curving nature of the track between the two stations. crowd sourced (but double checked, its creator told me) map of London plague pits by the group Historic UK, later picked up by publications ranging from the Daily Mail to the Telegraph, mentions that a runaway lane for trains at Elephant Castle junction canada goose outlet uk is blocked off by a plague pit, while the Victoria Line drilled through a pit under Green Park.
Underground system passes through many burial grounds and plague pits, says Peter Ackroyd in his 2012 book, London Under.
View image of Many people believe that plague pits, like the one here, are scattered throughout London
Canada Goose Coats On Sale But did plague pits or human burials at all really affect the shape of London underground lines? Canada Goose Coats On Sale
Canada Goose Jackets As it turns out, probably not. But the truth, in some ways, is even stranger and even more morbid. Canada Goose Jackets
Canada Goose Parka When I asked London transport historians about the plague pit Tube connection, the overall response was a collective eye roll. One goose outlet canada after another told me that, in all of their record scouring of Underground history, they never come across any mentions of plague pits. the Transport for London Corporate Archives, I was told that there are no specific references to plague pits in their records, he wrote in his book London Urban Legends: The canada goose outlet ottawa Corpse on the Tube and Other Stories. wanted to make sure plague pits really are everywhere in London lore so I went through the files on the planning and construction of the Victoria line and the Fleet line, which became the Jubilee line, under Green Park. Wood, like everyone else, turned up empty. Canada Goose Parka
uk canada goose outlet View image of An 1868 illustration of St Pancras station, then the terminus of the Midland Railway uk canada goose outlet
Not only that. Aside from one well known example at St Pancras railway station in the 1860s, experts say they hadn come across mentions of human remains of any kind in their research of the Underground early years. found dead bodies at all, says transport journalist and expert Christian Wolmar.
Experts were also quick to point out that we know why the subway lines curve, and it not because of plague pits. It because of cost.
The first routes, including the Circle, District and Metropolitan railways, were built using mainly and cover construction. This meant digging a trench about 30ft wide by 20ft deep, bricking in walls and a roof, then shovelling everything over with about 6ft of topsoil. As a result, the railway companies had to purchase any private property affected by construction. In 1860, for example, the Metropolitan Railway bought and demolished some 1,000 homes for the line from King Cross to Farringdon.
View image of A 19th century photograph shows an underground line being built using and cover
Even when tunnelling was used more frequently as it was later with the Central, Piccadilly, Bakerloo, Hammersmith City and Northern lines people believed that building collapses could occur if a tunnel was dug underneath. So the law still required that the railway companies buy any property they passed under.
Canada Goose sale As a result, whenever they could, the companies dug under publicly owned roads. Canada Goose sale
canada goose factory sale View image of 1855 proposal for a railway under Oxford https://www.canadagoosejacketsforcheap.com Street and Piccadilly (Credit: Credit: Alamy) canada goose factory sale
It easy to see just how much of the Tube is canada goose outlet online store explained this way by looking at a geographically accurate map, which you can see here. Looking it as an overlay on Google Maps, like with, makes it easier to see the roads.