Bishop's Square Charnel House - Spitalfields, London, UK
N 51° 31.197 W 000° 04.662
30U E 702736 N 5711696
These remains of a charnel house were discovered whilst development was taking place in the area. The ruins have been incorporated into the surroundings with a glass pavement that allows a view from above.
Waymark Code: WMJGJ1
Location: London, United Kingdom
Date Posted: 11/16/2013
Views: 14
There are steps leading down to the charnel house that can be seen behind a
glass wall. Inscribed on the glass is a history of the site:
Charnel House
The crypt of the chapel of St Mary Magdalene and St Edmund the Bishop built
in about 1320 and sited in the cemetery of the priory and Hospital of St
Mary Spital. This crypt was used as a charnel house, a store for human bones
disturbed during the digging of graves within the cemetery. In the chapel
above services were held to dedicate the bones beneath. After St Mary Spital
was closed 1539, most of the bones were removed, and the crypt became a
house until it was demolished in about 1700. The crypt then lay forgotten
beneath the gardens of terraced houses and then Steward Street until it was
found in archaeological excavations in 1999.
A series of coloured panels, opposite the charnel house glass front, tell of
the area and how it was used.
The
Open House London 2013 website has a fact sheet that tells us:
During the main phase of excavation at Spitalfields
Market in 1999, a remarkably well-preserved charnel house (a repository for
storing bones) dating to c 1320 was discovered in the cemetery of St Mary
Spitalfields.
Although Scheduled Monument Consent had been granted to remove all the
archaeological deposits on the site, it was agreed that this building should
be preserved within the new development.
Detailed plans were drawn up by Norman Foster and Associates in conjunction
with Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA) and Ove Arup to preserve the
charnel house and display it to the public. The engineering constraints of
the new building meant that slots had to be cut into the wall for beams to
support the new floor above and that major new piles were required on the
south side of the charnel house, which meant that previously preserved areas
needed excavation.
Three MOLA members of staff dug a total of 70 medieval burials on the south
side of the charnel house. During the main phase of excavation in 1999 and
in subsequent phases in 2000 and 2001 a large number of mass burial pits
were discovered containing up to 50 or so people in each and totalling more
than 2750 in all.
The most important discovery in the final phase of work was that the mass
burial pits predated the charnel house. We now believe that the mass burials
were interred between 1280 and 1310 and that the charnel house was built
shortly afterwards.
The large numbers of bones being disturbed during the excavation of the mass
burial pits may even have been a motivation for the construction of the
charnel house. Two more members of staff then removed certain tightly
defined slots in the upper parts of the south wall to provide locations for
supports to the new floor to be constructed above. This gave us the chance
to understand better the way the building was constructed.
The charnel house has now been restored and repaired by Holden Conservation
and is currently in a protective box during the main construction phase of
new offices for Allen and Overy. Once the new building is complete, members
of the public will be able to access a dedicated basement to view this
remarkable medieval building and, by arrangement with the Museum of London,
they will be able to enter and examine at close quarters this important part
of medieval London.