Cross Bones Burial Ground

On Redcross Way, Southwark in the shadow of The Shard and London Bridge Station you will find Cross Bones Burial Ground. The site contains up to 15,000 people believed to have been buried up to 1863 with its earliest mention in 1598. It served as a paupers graveyard for a long time within the area known as “The Mint” - one of the capitals poorest and most violent areas. 

It is also the resting place of The Winchester Geese, medieval sex workers licensed by the Bishop of Winchester who worked the brothels of The Liberty of the Clink, which lay outside the law of the City of London.  This site has in depth detail. 

The eastern part was dug up in the 1990s during work for the Jubilee Line extension. The area is now dedicated to ‘the outcast dead’ and serves as a garden of remembrance. At 19:00 on the 23rd of each. I think a serve is performed. 

John Stow mentioned a “Single Woman’s churchyard” in his book A Survey of London (1598) and it was mentioned again in a history of St. Saviours, Southwark (1795). William Taylor also mention per it in 1833. The courtyard closed in 1853 due to being “overcharged with dead”  which caused concerns over public health and public decency. Excavations by the Museum of London Archaeology Service from 1991 to 1998 state that graves were found with bodies piled one on top of another. Tests listed causes of death that included smallpox, tuberculosis, Paget’s disease, osteoarthritis and Vitamin D deficiency. 

A 1992 dig found 148graves dating from 1800 to 1853 with over one third of the bodies being perinatal (between 22 weeks gestation and seven days after birth) and a further 11 percent were under one year old. The adults were mostly women aged 36 and under. 

The site is not always open to the public as it relies on volunteers so check before visiting. You’ll see from the photos that no stones or personalised monuments exist but sculptures, statues, shrines and pieces of art are there to honour the dead. The fence area contains ribbons with names of some of the supposed people buried at the site to honour their memory. 

There is more information at their website. 

KOKO, Camden, London.

KOKO is a venue of many names - previously called Camden Theatre (1900-1909), Camden Hippodrome Theatre (1909-1913), Camden Hippodrome Picture Theatre (1913-1945), BBC Camden Theatre (1945-1977), The Music Machine (1977-1982) and The Camden Palace (1982-2004). 

It has a capacity of 1500 and was renovated in 2004 having originally opened on Boxing Day 1900 with a larger capacity of 2434. 

Among its claims to fame is that it was the site for the recording of The Last Goon Show of All on 30th April 1972 featuring Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe. Monty Python recorded an album here in 1972 and Madonna made her first UK performance here. After a large fire in 2020 it reopened as KOKO in April 2022.

Mydiddee at St. Paul’s Churchyard, Deptford

Mydiddee was said to be the servant of a Tahitian Chief who was brought to England by Captain Bligh. Mydiddee was meant to be a cultural ambassador but died within a month of arriving at Deptford. Bligh was on a mission involving bringing back breadfruit plants and it seems there was an attempt to vaccinate Mydiddee against smallpox which went wrong and caused his death. He had been hospitalised in Jamaica on the return journey due to his condition so by time Deptford was on the horizon it seems his fate was sealed. 

The ships doctor, Edward Harwood, wrote his epitaph - 

Stranger, with solemn step approach, and know

A fav’rite son of nature sleeps below.

From that fam’d Queen of Southern Isles he came,

Fair Otahytey; fir’d by British fame:

And Providence each deep safe wafted o’er,

Yet only gave to hail the promis’d shore;

For here could life alas! no more supply,

Than just to look around him, and to die. 

Bligh paid for a funeral and tombstone but it wasn’t put in place until 1988 at a cost of £500 from a study group. 

An excellent account can be found here 

Prospect Cottage, Dungeness, Kent

Prospect Cottage is a Victorian Fisherman’s hut which is most well known for being the final home of director and artist Derek Jarman until his death in 1994. The timber walls are weatherproofed with tar and the outer wall has lines from the poem “The Sun Rising” by John Donne. The 1990 film The Garden was filmed here. 

Sculptures and hardy weather plants surround the cottage and Jarman wrote a book about it called Derek Jarman’s Garden with photography by Howard Sooley. When Jarman passed the cottage passed to his partner Keith Collins but was put up for sale in 2018 when Collins passed. Creative Folkestone are the custodians of the cottage after funding from Art Fund. 

All photographs from 23 September 2023. 

Jarman’s grave at Old Romney’s St. Clement Church. I have a page for the church here. 

The New York Subway

The New York subway has 472 stations and 36 lines and began operation I’m 1904. I don’t want to go into facts and figures but it’s amazing to consider it has 248 miles of route and can reach a top speed of 55mph but has an average speed of 17.4mph. I don’t normally get excited about trains and subways but I grew up in London and the London Underground is iconic entity and part of everyday life in Central London that I’ve used from a young age so it was mind blowing to ride its American cousin. 

Like a multiverse variant of something I’m already familiar with I learnt one golden rule - The Bronx is up and Brooklyn’s down. I’d already heard something similar from The Beastie Boys Hello Brooklyn “New York, New York it’s a hell of a town, You know The Bronx is up and I’m Brooklyn down”. Anyway, here are some random shots from my time there.