Liverpool Street station is built on the site of Bedlam, and the burial ground was found when they dug the Crossrail tunnel
Humble Grape at Liverpool Street holds a 4.8 from eight hundred and ten people, charges twenty to eighty pounds, and is a wine shop you can drink in – which we have called, in five postcodes, the best value proposition in London.
And the station it is named after is standing on Bedlam.
Bethlem
The Hospital of St Mary of Bethlehem was founded as a priory in 1247, and by the fourteenth century it was taking in the mentally ill.
It is the oldest institution of its kind in Europe. It still exists, in Beckenham, as a functioning NHS psychiatric hospital.
And its name became a word. Bethlem, slurred, became Bedlam – and it entered English as a term for uproar, chaos and madness, and it is one of the very few institutions in the world to have given its name to a noun meaning disorder.
The visiting
Which is the fact that people find hardest.
For a period, the public could visit Bethlem and look at the patients.
It was an entertainment. It is described by contemporaries as something Londoners did on a holiday – going to see the mad, as one might go to see the lions at the Tower – and the hospital took the money.
The practice was eventually stopped, and the debate about it in the eighteenth century is one of the earliest recognisably modern arguments about the dignity of the mentally ill.
But it happened, for a long time, and it was popular.
What they found
In 2015, digging the Crossrail tunnel at Liverpool Street, they excavated the Bedlam burial ground.
Around three thousand skeletons were recovered.
They were not all hospital patients – it was a general burial ground for the parish, used for over a century and a half, and it took the poor, the plague dead, and anybody else who could not afford elsewhere.
Plague bacteria were identified in some of the teeth, confirming a 1665 pit.
Three thousand people, under a railway station, found because somebody was building a tunnel – and the excavation was one of the largest archaeological digs ever conducted in London, and it was done in eighteen months, under a deadline, because the trains were coming.
The bar
A 4.8 across eight hundred and ten people is a very strong number on a very serious sample.
Buy the bottle. Pay the corkage. Stand up if you can. The wine is identical and the saving is enormous and the only thing you have given up is a chair.
Verdict
Excellent wine, excellent format.
Go, and know that three thousand people were lifted out of the ground beneath the platform you arrived on.
What the dig found
Not a horror story. Something quieter and worse.
The skeletons showed rickets, and scurvy, and the specific bone deformations of hard physical labour begun in childhood. Teeth worn to the roots. Healed fractures that had been set badly or not at all.
They were poor. That is the finding, and it is unremarkable, and it is the whole point.
Three thousand people whose lives left no other record at all – no will, no portrait, no letter – and the only evidence that they existed is what the work did to their bones.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
