Crossrail engineers excavating tunnels under Liverpool Street have unearthed a “gruesome but exciting” mass burial site thought to contain 30 bubonic plague victims from the 1600s.
Workers digging in the City of London made the discovery while building the eastern entrance of the new station at the Bedlam burial ground - a few yards east of the existing station.
Although they hoped to find bodies buried during the 16th to 18th centuries, they did not know precisely what they would uncover.
Jay Carver, Crossrail’s lead archaeologist, said: “The construction of Crossrail gives us a rare opportunity to study previously inaccessible areas of London and learn about the lives and deaths of 16th and 17th century Londoners.
“This mass burial, so different to the other individual burials found in the Bedlam cemetery, is very likely a reaction to a catastrophic event. Only closer analysis will tell if this is a plague pit from The Great Plague in 1665 but we hope this gruesome but exciting find will tell us more about the one of London’s most notorious killers.”
Bedlam saw four outbreaks of plague during its operation between 1569 and about 1740, but archaeologists believe this latest find is likely to date to the Great Plague that killed a quarter of London’s population in 1665 and 1666.
A headstone found nearby marked “1665” and the fact the bodies had been buried on the same day pointed towards the Great Plague, according to Crossrail’s in-house history experts.
“The thin wooden coffins have collapsed and rotted, giving the appearance of a slumped and distorted mass grave,” a spokesman said. “The skeletons will now be analysed by osteologists from Museum of London Archaeology and scientific tests may reveal if bubonic plague or some other pestilence was the cause of death.”
MOLA has so far pulled more than 3,500 skeletons from the cemetery, which takes its name from Bethlem Hospital in south-east London.
