London Urban Legends

by Scott Wood

  The earliest reference I can find to the ‘Brandy Nan’ rhyme is from an article of royal nicknames from the Northern Echo on 12 May 1896, which tantalisingly says that ‘readers will remember the following lines which a wit of questionable taste bestowed on [Queen Anne’s] statue’. The rhyme was well known enough to make it into Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, published in 1898.

  The original statue did receive a lot of abuse aside from insulting poems. In September 1743 the Universal London Morning Advertiser described the release of John Vaile, who had spent time in an asylum for breaking off the statues sceptre. ‘Notes & Queries’ from 11 April 1857 remembers that an arm was knocked off the statue in 1780, and was rumoured to have been done by a drunken man (though it may just have fallen off.) It notes that ‘the statue of Queen Anne in St Paul’s Church Yard seems endowed with the undesirable power of provoking the malice of iconoclasts’.

  People still couldn’t leave the statue alone in the 1960s, as a Daily Telegraph story from 20 October 1967 states that the statue is still ‘a persistent target for vandals and over the years has been robbed of limbs, fingers, orb and sceptre.’

  The statue of Queen Anne now has a fence running across her plinth and stands in peace; the only real indignity delivered to her now is how often she is mistaken for that other slightly stout female monarch, Queen Victoria.

  Brandy Nan on the Prowl

  The iconoclasts had better watch out. Way west of St Paul’s, over on Queen Anne’s Gate just off St James’ Park, is another statue of Queen Anne that has an even stranger story attached to it than that of a boozy poem and a connection to a Mormon leader. In this quiet corner of affluent London, on the anniversary of Queen Anne’s death – 1 August – the statue gets down from its pedestal and walks up and down the road.

  The earliest version of the statue moving that I have found was in a cartoon by Peter Jackson for the Evening News. A later version, in the Reader’s Digest book Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain is the source for paranormal researcher James Clarke’s account in his book Haunted London. James’ account has the addition of the statue’s promenade taking place on the stroke of midnight of the anniversary of the queen’s death which, he told me, came from the guide of a walking tour he had taken. Always a reliable source.

  Everyone loves the terrifying thought of statues coming alive. The earliest account I could find that may relate to Queen Anne’s statue moving is from Return of Outdoor Memorials in London and reads as follows: ‘The children of the locality were accustomed in their play to call upon the statue, by the name of ‘Bloody Queen Mary’, to descend from its pedestal, and on receiving, naturally, no response, to assail it with missiles.’

  This does not sound to me like an account of a walking statue, but of a game played by children. There may be other and earlier stories of the Queen Anne statue walking around that the compiler of Returns may not have known about, but the children did. Or perhaps it was a game children played before pelting the statue, and the story grew from misreadings of this account and similar ones. But where did the story of the statue moving on an auspicious date come from?

  Western Europe’s landscape is littered with stone circles, lines of stones and other clusters of stone left from our Neolithic past. At present, these are places of fascination; tourist sites that, for some, hold some ancient peace and wisdom within their bulk and patterns. Earlier peoples had a terror of these giant stones lying on the land and formed different stories of magic to explain them. So the Bulmer Stone in Darlington turns nine times at midday, while the stones that make up the circles of Nine Maids of Belstone Tor and Merry Maids of St Buryan are in fact petrified women who danced on the Sabbath. All of these legendary stones move at some point in time – at cock’s crow, at midnight, at midday, on Midsummer Eve or Midwinter Eve or some other time. There are at least three hundred accounts of stones or stone circles moving at a liminal time, like the change of one day to another for Queen Anne, and the legend has managed to make its way from the countryside and into Westminster to attach itself to the statue. This may have been unconscious, as folklore, or conscious, by attaching an older myth to a new object. That statues move like megaliths has also made its way to Bloomsbury, where a recent tale emerged about the stone lions sitting outside the north entrance of the British Museum. Be there at midnight and you will see them stand up and stretch. Ideas are more durable than stone: even before statues wear away, their meaning can become lost and confused but ideas can breed and evolve amongst human humour, wit, error and fear, and can travel in the breath and letters of everyone.

  11

  PLAGUE PITS

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  The Black Death has entered London’s folk memory as a founding urban myth; every pothole in the road, every bump in a tube journey, every square or roundabout seems to have a plague story attached to it.

  Richard Barnett, Sick City: Two Thousand Years

  of Life and Death In London

  * * *

  WHEN I FIRST moved to the capital I lived in south-west London. I was told that nearby Mortlake had gained its name from the time of the Great Plague. The bodies of plague victims had been sunk into the lake which, forever more, was known as ‘The Lake of the Dead’: Mort-lake. I was not the only new arrival to London to hear about the city’s burial sites for plague victims. A friend fresh from the north west of England and new to south-east London was told that she would need inoculating before going up to the giant plague pit that is Blackheath. Even after decades here it feels like a step cannot be taken in London without crushing someone’s bones, and a journey cannot be made without passing by, or through, a plague pit.

  Clear pieces of land in the overcrowded city are thought to be where plague pits sit and seethe in the landscape. A work colleague and I were discussing this, and he told me that the ‘small green on Caledonian Road and Wynford Street is on the site of a plague pit. That’s why it was never built on.’ He was told this in the early 1970s when he started a job in that area.

  These mass graves are too dangerous to dig into or build over; infection may be lurking beneath the soil waiting for fresh air and a fresh chance to infect people. I read on a web forum that if there is an oval bulging out of an otherwise straight alley behind a line of Victorian houses, it is because there is a plague pit there. These could be seen on maps of nineteenth-century Tottenham, Stoke Newington and Islington before twentieth-century developers blundered over them.

  Mount Pond on Clapham Common is a plague pit, as is the triangular piece of land where Champion Hill meets Denmark Hill in Camberwell. Horniman Triangle, the field opposite the Horniman Museum, is a plague pit. The roundabout on the corner of Gypsy Hill and Allen Park is a pit. In Norbury in the 1980s there was a protest against plans to put storage containers on a piece of land thought to be a plague pit.

  They are not just a suburban danger, however. In his book Underground London: Travels Beneath the City Streets, Stephen Smith mentions that the Harvey Nichols basement menswear department has a low ceiling as the building cannot be dug any deeper into the ground, for fear of disturbing a pit. In the 1970s and ’80s the London Folklore Group’s newsletter, London Lore, told of an international bank with an office in the City on Gracechurch Street whose employees thought it was built over the graves of plague victims. The building had its own water supply, which some of the workers in the bank would refuse to drink for fear of infection.

  The London Underground has to curve around, drop under or plough straight through the assembled subterranean plague victims previously left in peace. The 1972 Reader’s Digest book Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain lists a tale about the Bakerloo line whilst on the way to St John’s Wood from Baker Street. This is now part of the Jubilee line. There is a point between the stations where the ears of passengers ‘pop’ as the tube tunnel drops to dip underneath a plague pit which sits beneath the Marylebone war memorial. The Piccadilly line between Knightsbridge and South Kensington stations has to bend
around Brompton Oratory to avoid a plague pit. Bank station, in the heart of the City, is built on a plague pit or at least will stink ‘like an open grave’ from fumes wafting up from the pit Liverpool Street station is built into. The Victoria line cut through a plague pit under Green Park in the 1960s, and according to Mike Heffernan on the Unexplained Mysteries website: ‘A huge tunnel-boring machine ploughed straight into a long-forgotten plague pit at Green Park, traumatising several brawny construction workers on site.’

  Stephen Smith reveals why Muswell Hill does not have a tube station: ‘They started to dig a tunnel there and hit a plague pit!’ One can also find on the internet the answer to the mystery of why there are far fewer tube stations in south London: because of endless pockets of dead plague victims. Tube drivers using the southbound escape tunnel for runaway trains on the Bakerloo line between Lambeth North and the Elephant and Castle must take care to not hit the end too hard, as a plague pit lies just beyond the walls at the end of the line.

  Blackheath

  Blackheath is an open windy space above Greenwich. Despite greater London enveloping all sides of the heath, it does still have a desolate beauty. Houses cluster all along the edge of the hill Blackheath sits on but they avoid the top of it because, according to lore, Blackheath gets its name from being a plague pit for Black Death victims, just as Mortlake is the lake of death. In his book And Did Those Feet: Walking Through 2000 Years of British and Irish History, Charlie Connolly, remembers: ‘I grew up in Blackheath in south London, to the casual observer just a great big expanse of grass sliced by a couple of roads. Yet it was a plague pit: during the Great Plague of 1665-6, hundreds of bodies were thrown into pits, scattered with lime and buried.’

  Connolly demonstrates part of the attraction to plague pit urban legends here: that the storyteller has hidden knowledge they can share. He can lift the veil from an everyday piece of waste ground or greenery and describe the horror and history behind it. There is a dark glamour there.

  On 7 April 2002, Blackheath Hill collapsed with a huge hole appearing across the A2 road so severe it took two years to repair. Remembering the event, a writer on the Tube Professionals Rumour Network website wrote that there was a ‘big fuss’ as Blackheath is ‘another plague pit’. The fuss about the big hole in the A2 was really about the big hole running across a major road. What had collapsed was not a burial pit but the cavern that runs underneath Blackheath and Blackheath Hill. Discovered in 1780, these connecting caverns are thought to be chalk pits or hiding places dug by locals during the Danish wars. They run along and under Blackheath Hill from Maidstone Hill. They are known as ‘Jack Cade’s Cavern’ in local lore, as it is thought the rebel leader Jack Cade hid in them to escape oppressive soldiers. Tours were given from 1850 and, after chandeliers were installed, balls were held in the caverns. They were abandoned in 1853 after a panic, when the lights went out. The caverns were next investigated in 1938 as a possible air-raid shelter. They were found unsuitable and were again sealed and forgotten about until the A2 caved in.

  Blackheath is not a plague pit, its name being in use since at least the twelfth century, more than 500 years before the Black Death arrived in Britain. ‘Blackheath’ is thought to have come from the dark colour of its soil or have evolved from its description as a bleak heath. People are very fond of digging on the heath: as well as whoever dug the chalk pits, Blackheath, like much common land, was used by locals to dig gravel. After the Second World War these gravel pits were used to bury rubble from the Blitz which were then grassed over, causing the heath to lose its rugged, gorse-covered appearance and become the grassy flat space we know today.

  The part of Blackheath that survived being built on – much of it didn’t – was not because of the dead beneath it, but the living defending their piece of land from enclosure and development.

  History being the weird, vast and diverse thing it is, of course, I will have to confess to you that there may still be a burial pit on Blackheath. Between 300-2,000 Cornishmen are in a mass grave somewhere on the heath. These men did not die as victims of the plague, but were killed by soldiers. They were camped up on Blackheath in 1497 on a march to London to protest against the taxes levied by King Henry VII to finance his war with Scotland. Henry sent in the troops and the Cornish rebels got no further than the heath. Local lore speculates that their bodies are buried beneath a mound called Whitfield’s Mount. This may or may not be true.

  The vast majority of burials in London are not related to the Black Death. However, the idea of the mass, unmarked pits still has such a hold over some imaginations that when we are hurtling through underground London it is always plague victims that keep us company down there.

  Green Park

  I have found little written down about London’s plague pits outside of repeated pieces of urban legends and the odd ominous nod toward a plague pit in the countless ‘Haunted London’ and ‘Ghosts of London’ books. Ghost books will use anything, like any good story-spinner, to set the right atmosphere for their tale. So the stories of the London Underground tunnel meeting a plague pit is in little threads across books, the internet and folklore. One of the clearer stories has already been quoted: the tunnelling of the Victoria line that disturbed a plague pit, while others say that the Jubilee line had to be redirected around a pit under the park.

  It is a sign of the poisoned ground of Green Park that flowers will not grow there and, like Blackheath, has a sense of bleakness about it made all the stranger and unsettling for its location in the centre of London. Peter Underwood described Green Park’s ‘stillness, an air of expectancy, and a sensation of sadness’ in his book Haunted London and James Clark mentions the park’s ‘subdued atmosphere’ in his London ghost book, also called Haunted London.

  There may well be diseased bodies under the turf of the park, but they are not plague victims. Before the Reformation, the site of St James’s Palace was a leper hospital; and this part of its history may have informed the plague myths of the park. The Victoria line, being the first deep tunnel line on the London Underground, does not see daylight at any point. This may also have stoked fears regarding what was down in the earth with the commuters. This has always been a fear related to subterranean travel: when an underground train line was first proposed for London, Dr Cuming held an open-air meeting at Smithfield preaching the apocalypse: ‘The forth-coming end of the world would be hastened by the construction of underground railways burrowing into the infernal regions and thereby disturbing the devil.’

  King Edward I granted the leper hospital the right to finance itself with an annual May Fair, so giving Mayfair, now one of London’s richest areas, its name from an annual charity festival for lepers. Green Park is the former grounds of this London leper colony. Henry VIII, during his marriage to Anne Boleyn, claimed the site for the Crown and St James’s Palace was built on the site of the hospital. The grounds were transformed into St James’s Park, with the neighbouring ground called Upper St James’s Park. However, this very ground (now known as Green Park) bears the mark of its history – flowers will not grow there. There are many theories as to why this is: flowers will not grow there because of the sad virgin leper girls buried beneath it; or perhaps it is because when the hospital was taken by the Crown, Henry VIII had the nuns of the hospital thrown onto the snowy ground of what is now the park. Some believe that there are no flowers in Green Park to mark heaven’s displeasure with this cruel story from the Reformation. The irony is, that according to Old and New London, the leper hospital at St James’s Park London was struck by the plague, which moved quicker than leprosy to take some of the inhabitants. None of this pestilent history has really affected the ground of Green Park however, because despite the lack of formal beds and gardens, narcissus flowers do bloom in Green Park in the spring.

  Down in the Ground

  Where the Dead Men Go

  Contacting the Transport for London Corporate Archives, I was told that there are no specific references to plague pits i
n their records. They had just been through their archive to mark the 150-year anniversary of the London Underground and nothing came up. I wanted to make sure – plague pits really are everywhere in London lore – so I went through the files on the planning and construction of the Victoria line and the Fleet line, which became the Jubilee line, under Green Park.

  The digging of the Victoria line is described in some detail in a pamphlet which was given away free when it opened. Miners were employed to work a digging shield that churned through the earth, and then reinforced the tunnels with concrete or steel supports. It must have been uncomfortable and claustrophobic and if they had met with bodies down there, it would have been just as unpleasant as the urban legend describes.

  There were no references in the archives to this work uncovering dead bodies. The nearest possible reference I found to the plague was a note stating that there would always be the disinfectant Dettol with the workers constructing the Fleet line.

  The plague pits of London are not lost and are not waiting to vomit up the dead onto unsuspecting builders and tunnel diggers. They are mostly well-mapped and their reality is every bit as unsettling and surprising as the urban myths. The mass graves were mainly dug for plague victims during the hottest, highest point of the Great Plague in August 1665. Before then, victims were buried in churchyards or in the grounds of pest houses (specially contained homes for isolating plague sufferers). Carnaby Street is near the sites of two seventeenth-century burial grounds for St James’s workhouse. These sites, full and closed by 1733, may have been used as plague pits in the swinging 1660s. Carnaby Street has also been reported as the site of a pest house, the gardens of which extend out across Golden Square and Wardour Street. Maitland, in his History of London, reported that ‘some thousands of corpses were buried that died of that dreadful and virulent contagion’.