Gone to reek and ruin

London’s majestic façade hides murky, malodorous tales of wretchedness and woe. Join Ellie Fazan on the horrible histories tour… (for Completely London)

We’re in Southwark to pay our respects to the outcast dead. ‘There have you the shouting of men, the barking of dogs, the growling of bears and the bellowing of bulls…’ That’s the area described in 1635. The Bankside land, known as the Liberty of the Clink, had been gifted to the Bishop of Winchester in 1107 and lay outside the jurisdiction of the City. The streets were ripe with prostitutes licensed by the church to perform lewd acts. Pestilence and plague were rife, but these ladies of the night, ‘the Winchester Geese’ who were protected by the church in life, were shunned in death. Denied burial in blessed earth, they were interred in unconsecrated parkland. A Royal decree in 1640 closed the Clink’s brothels, but the Crossbones gravesite remained their final destination until 1853, when it was ‘completely charged with dead’. Charles Dickens described the wretched area as teeming ‘with every repulsive lineament of poverty, every loathsome indication of filth, rot and garbage’. Today, you’ll find its rusty gates colourfully decorated in memory of the 15,000 bodies buried there. Corpses are packed so close to the surface that even today heavy rain can dredge up bones and teeth.