Crossbones Graveyard is a burial site just beyond the margins of the City, over the river in Southwark. It was intensively used for poor burials between the late 17th until the mid-19th century, then known as St Saviour’s Burying Ground or the Cross Bones. A popular local tradition also links the burial ground with a Single Women’s Churchyard, an unconsecrated burial site for the women who worked in Southwark’s medieval brothels.
Having been redeveloped and eventually left to post-industrial ruin in the years after its closure, the fact that Crossbones was a burial ground had been largely forgotten by the 1990s, when Transport for London purchased the site. As thousands of bodies were exhumed to make way for the electricity substation that would power the Jubilee Line, local people began a concerted effort to prevent further development of the burial site. A sustained campaign has since established a ‘wild’ garden for ‘the Outcast Dead’ on its surface.
For more information on the grassroots campaign, visit the Friends of Crossbones at crossbones.org.uk
To keep up with Bankside Open Spaces Trust, who manage Crossbones Graveyard and Garden of Remembrance, visit bost.org.uk