The Plague Pits Still Under London's Streets

In 1665, the Great Plague killed around 100,000 Londoners in roughly eighteen months — close to a quarter of the city’s population at the time. The normal burial system collapsed. Churchyards overflowed. Grave space ran out.

So London dug pits.

Mass burial grounds — plague pits — were opened across the city. Bodies were laid in long trenches in layers, dusted with quicklime, and covered. Some pits held hundreds; some held many more. Many of the locations were recorded in parish registers, pamphlets and later accounts, then gradually folded into the fabric of the expanding city.

They are still there.

The horror under the streets Over the next three centuries, London grew outward and upward. Fields became streets, streets became terraces, terraces became stations and offices. Burials that had once been on the edge of town ended up under central pavements.

When the Underground began construction in the 1860s and later, engineers and diggers drove tunnels and foundations through soil that had been used for burials in the 16th and 17th centuries. They did not actively seek out every plague pit; they simply dug where the railway needed to go.

Aldgate station, opened in 1876, sits in an area known to have contained plague burials and other mass graves, referenced by writers like Daniel Defoe in A Journal of the Plague Year (a partly fictionalised but informed account). Bones and human remains were encountered during construction and later works — a common experience in central London excavation. The platforms and tunnels were built anyway, with remains either reburied elsewhere or left undisturbed beneath the structural level.

Liverpool Street is another, even better documented case. The station sits by the site of the “Bedlam burial ground” (used from the mid‑16th century to the 18th century), which included plague victims, inmates of the Bethlem Royal Hospital and ordinary Londoners. When the Crossrail project dug under the station in the 2010s, archaeologists uncovered thousands of skeletons; they were recorded, sampled and reburied, as required by law.

Sections of the Central line, Bakerloo line and other routes pass beneath or near documented historic burial grounds, including sites used during plague years. Much of the clay and gravel that the trains run through still contains human remains, whether individual burials or clustered pits.

London does not mark this in the everyday environment. There are no plaques on platforms saying “This station is built above a mass grave.” No announcements: “The next stop is Marble Arch. Beneath you are layers of 17th‑century dead.” The separation between commuters and corpses is a few metres of soil and concrete.

The modern relic in the commute London’s plague pits and early modern burial grounds are not, for the most part, preserved as heritage parks. They are treated as part of the subsoil of a functioning metropolis.

When a major construction project disturbs human remains, there are procedures: archaeologists are called in, bones are documented and respectfully reburied, reports are written. When projects do not cut deep enough to hit the burials, those remains simply stay where they are.

Scholars and archaeologists estimate that scores — likely more than a hundred — mass or near‑mass burial sites from 1665 and other epidemic years lie under modern London, many beneath buildings, streets and rail infrastructure. Excavating them all would be logistically difficult and enormously expensive; most will never be fully explored.

So the dead remain underground. Not primarily out of reverence, but because it is impractical to do anything else.

Millions of people use the Underground every day. They stand on platforms poured over ground that once received bodies at a rate of dozens per day. They ride through tunnels carved through layers that contain people who died of plague, smallpox, typhus and other diseases long vanished from the city’s hospitals. The trains are timetabled. The bones are still.

The result is a kind of unintentional memorial: a city that buried its crisis, quite literally, and then built its future on top of it. London is exceptionally good at building. It is less good at remembering where the foundations came from.

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