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Bethlem Burial Ground

  Crossrail is Europe’s largest construction project. As work continues archaeologists from the Museum of London have had the chance to investigate Bethel Burial Ground, near Liverpool Street Station. From 1569 and for another 170 years some 20,000 corpses were buried, mainly from the working and middle classes. During that time London’s population quadrupled to half a million. Archaeologists have made some fascinating discoveries as they dug up 3,000 bodies. They haven't identified any of the corpses but volunteers have trawled through some of the parish records of the 124 churches. Many of the deceased were not Londoners but came from as fa...

Hidden London

    In an anonymous-looking warehouse in Hackney you’ll find the Museum of London Archaeology Archives. And behind the brick and steel building in N1 I recently had the pleasure of enjoying a tour, led by two enthusiastic volunteers. Here are all manner of finds, from masses of bones to shards of pottery and large items deemed to big to store, are safely stored in buff-coloured boxes, clearly labelled. When anything is found at a dig they are deemed either ‘registered’ - of significant interest or man-made - or ‘general’, for items like broken shards or fragments of bone. Whenever a developer wants to build a new structure they have to...

Bay of Plenty

In the mid 1600s two Frenchmen, the grandly named Médard Chouart, Sieur des Groseilliers (1618-1696) and his brother-in-law Pierre Ésprit Radisson (c. 1640-1710), were exploring the vast interior of what is now northern Canada. Working their way inland via the many rivers that flow into Hudson Bay, they came across a wealth of fur, in particular on a rodent with a large paddle-shaped tail and prominent teeth. “Ideal for coats,” they reported, and went to find a backer. Their fellow countrymen in Québec and France showed little interest but the English settlers were far more receptive.  The two intrepid trappers travelled to England and managed to ga...

A whiff of Bauhaus

The City of London is not well-known for its 1930s buildings. Between the Daily Express and Daily Telegraph buildings on Fleet Street, the impressive Ibex House in the Minories and the delightful Fox Fine Wines shop in Moorgate (formerly the Fox umbrella shop) you could be stumped trying to think of any more modernist monuments within the Square Mile. Walk out of Cannon Street Station, however, and look for the small Nii Haw sushi bar straight ahead of you. Before it fed local office workers with dim sum this cute and curvaceous outlet was a branch of TM Lewin. But 80 years ago 115 Cannon Street - to give its correct address - was the Mortimer Gall...

Join the Kew: a short history of Kew Green

Kew Green is one of the delights of west London. Around its picturesque cricket field lie a number of very attractive 18th- and 19th-century houses, where a number of famous people made their homes. Its history goes back to the medieval period, not least because there was a ferry crossing where the bridge now lies. Kew Pond, whose history may well date as far back as 996, was used as a fish pond for centuries. We know Kew was a hamlet in the 1300s, then called ‘Cayho’, which was derived from the Old English word ‘hoh’, meaning spur. In the 16th century Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk and brother-in-law of Henry VIII held estates here but it...

A Bridge over Hammersmith

Currently closed for 3 years, Hammersmith Bridge is one of London’s most attractive crossings. There’s been a bridge connecting Hammersmith and Barnes for nearly 200 years, and ever since the first one was opened in 1827 there have been complaints about its strength. With Hammersmith becoming an important agricultural and industrial part of west London there had been an increasing need to add more river crossings. With this in mind the authorities turned to local engineer William Tierney Clark, who’s best known for the Széchenyi Chain Bridge that spans the Danube in Budapest. Even at the start of the work, when the Duke of Sussex blessed the bridge,...