A Deluge of Dead Guys; or, What Do You Do With A Disused Churchyard? Part Two: Postman's Park

I've talked before about how London has limited public space. This is one of the major problems about living on an island- there's only so much space you can take up, and when you have to factor in offices, living space, restaurants, stores, schools, and all the roads you need to make a city run... well, sometimes you have to make compromises. One of these compromises is often found in the old churchyards, especially of smaller parishes.

Today, we're going to look at Postman's Park.

 

 

Postman's Park is home to the Watt's Memorial for Self-Sacrifice and exactly one female duck. It comprises the churchyards from St. Leonard's, St. Botolph's, and Christchurch in Newgate Street's graveyard, and-

"Wait! Hold on a tic," you're saying. "You're contradicting yourself. You TOLD us graveyards weren't a thing until 1842. What gives?"

Well, Christchurch in Newgate Street was a bit of a technical issue. See, Newgate is home to hellhounds a former prison. And unlike in a Dickensian debtors' prison, Newgate was prison where a large percentage of the population was hanged. Now, in the eyes of the church, if you were hanged, it was because you were a sinner. And unlike today, you could repent, but it was still unlikely that God would accept your soul, because, let's face it. If you got caught doing one bad thing, you probably did lots of them. And you can't bury a long-term sinner in consecrated ground! The idea was that the bodies in the churchyards would be uncorrupted by the bodies of these long-term sinners. Prisons often had their own graveyards, where bodies were just thrown into pits or shallow graves. These were typically left unmarked; however, careful records were kept in the prison. Newgate had several graveyards attached to local churches. The priests of these churches would visit the prisoners before their executions, hear their confessions, and offer them communion one final time. It wasn't uncommon for these churches to donate a parcel of their churchyard to be used for criminals, conveniently located on the other side of the fence. This particular parcel abutted the graveyards of two churches, one of which no longer exists (St. Botolph's and Christchurch, Newgate are still around.)

Postman's Park is home to hundreds of burials. Would you like to know how many?
I'll tell you this: Postman's Park is elevated quite a bit above the current street level because there were so many bodies and so little space, often they'd just lay the bodies on the ground and pile dirt on them. And people wonder where these black dog legends come from...

Nowadays, though, you wouldn't know that. The churchyards sat reeking until 1858, when it was decided to turn them into a public park. They didn't want to get rid of all of the gravestones, though, so while they developed the park, they disinterred many of the upper level burials, shipped them out to various other cemeteries, and then moved the headstones to the walls to mark the boundary of the new park. Check it out:

The park didn't actually open until 1880, due to the difficulties of development. Imagining digging a pond for a fountain and turning up a femur every five minutes.

(Side note: The park also housed one female duck, who was quite upset that I was standing near her fountain.)

 

While this grave was very difficult to read, it was obviously judged too difficult to remove. It's important to notice that there are no ornate headstones here- there's hardly anything that isn't a flat stone or a ground slab, other than this...

And this. This stone has a marble vase on top that was clearly added long after the stone's erection- possibly to jazz it up.

 

 The difference of material and construction is obvious; it doesn't match. Normally, ornamental gravestones were constructed of the same thing, occasionally including an accent stone. The carving's weathering has some serious differential weathering, too- while you can't read the gravestone itself, take a look at the detail on the vase.

 

This is one that they are clearly maintaining; they've added a modern attachment to the vase and are somehow keeping it drained. 

 

Can you spot the hidden gravestones?

 

The park, as I said, also houses an interesting memorial to heroic self-sacrifice. This was put up in 1900 and is dedicated to average, everyday people who gave their lives for others. Many are teenagers.

 

However, none of them are buried in the park, obviously. I took the below picture to show you an example of the patterns of gravestones and to show you how they are used as decorative objects.

This one is particularly interesting in that it's a double gravestone for a man and a woman where the woman's first name is mentioned on the stone. She died in 1772, long before this sort of thing came into real fashion.

Mrs. Eleanor Lovell.

While this gravestone is rather forward-thinking and rather prominently displayed, I wondered if I could find any evidence of marginalization in this incredibly disturbed burial site. A quick peek 'round the corner kinda proved that I could. Here are some small, poor-quality stones that have evidence of engraving on them, being used to hold a ladder and garbage. Anonymous in death and unimportant in posterity, it is unlikely that these were the gravestones of any high-ranking member of society. Perhaps these were used for poor parishioners... or perhaps the children of poor parishioners.

In stark contrast, we have this memorial, found right outside the park, built into the wall.

I like this picture for several reasons. One, it shows you just how high off street level the ground of Postman's Park is- that bowl is at chest level. Two, that's a gravestone and formerly a working fountain. And not just any gravestone, oh no- this was specifically for a married woman (not for her husband, who presumably is elsewhere) who was very wealthy and apparently very involved with the local council. I'll tell you a bit more about who she is in a later post, when I explain why the tried-and-true technique of taking a rubbing is actually kind of worthless sometimes.

So that's it for Postman's Park! Pay attention for next time, when I talk about St. Olaf the Pirate King and terrible rubbings!

Anorexic Tardis

I found this outside of Postman's Park.

It's so skinny!

Hunting Hellhounds

In America, we have stories about Bigfoot, a huge hairy ape man who isn't at all good to look at.

In England, they have Big Black Dogs.

Big Black Dogs are kind of England's big cryptozoological critter. Usually they basically look about the same- a big black fella with glowing red or green eyes, long fur, cropped ears, and a really fluffy tail. They're typically tall, shepherd-or-collie lookin' dogs, and they howl more than they bark. Aside from the harbinger of (my own) death thing, they're basically everything I'd ever want in a dog.

Drawing this was wish fulfillment. Also: this is literally the exact opposite of my own dog.

There's all kinds of legends. There's the Black Shuck, who you see before you die. Unless you're a woman. Then he'll protect you on your walk home.

(Video rated PG-13 for lots of swears)

There's the Gurt Dog in Somerset, who protects children playing on the hill and lone travellers through the area.

There's the Barghest, who will eat you.

There's Cu Sith, the Scottish variant, who is sometimes green and doesn't really do much other than howl ominously.

And then there's the scads of local dogs that have their own legends and tales and all manner of goodness. Or badness, as the case may be.

London has a few hounds of its own, and I decided to go looking for one. I was near the Old Bailey the other night, taking pictures for my Finding Neverwhere project

Consider these a preview/motivation for actually FINISHING that project.

 Anyways, I was poking around the area, and I saw a sign. And it had this on it.

Well now!, thought I. Not everyday you see a public interest sign with a very large dog on it. So over to it I went, reading in the dim light. It told the story of the Newgate Hound, which goes about like this:

Once, before the church and its cloisters were built, a prison stood at Newgate. Built on and of the bricks of the medieval gate, it faced the great Court buildings, where the hardened reprobates and pitiable debtors alike could see the passive face of Justice looking at them through the slit windows.

Near to the prison, between it and the Old Bailey, was a small passageway called Amen Court.

 At the end of Ave Maria Street, it was where prisoners would leave Newgate for the last time. While its name might have officially been Amen Court, they had another name for it: The Deadman's Walk.

 One day, a man was brought to the prison. He was no debtor, no thief, no murderer; no, in the eyes of the Church and therefore the eyes of the court, he was something far worse. A sorcerer! He was due to stand trial, but it was lean times at Newgate. The prisoners had poor fare and not much of it, and they were hungry... and a sorcerer was the worst of the worst. Ravenously, the man's fellow prisoners fell upon him, devouring him alive. No intervention came from the guards, and it seemed that the prisoners would have no punitive measures taken for their cannibalism...

But they'd eaten a sorcerer, and had forgotten what that meant. The night after the man was killed, a monstrous black dog appeared with hellfire eyes and slavering jaws. The prisoners, spurred by their terror, managed to kill the guards and escape- or so they thought. One by one, the dog hunted them down and killed them, ripping them from head to throat and leaving their bodies to rot in the street.

From then on, it's been said that at night, you can still hear the dog's dragging footsteps in Amen Court, near the avenue facing the jail. Perhaps amongst the iron gratings and scrollwork and roses, you'll be able to see a glimpse of black fur, or the glow of two burning eyes. Perhaps you'll smell him, the stench of blood mixed with the nigh-tangible odor of pure fear. Perhaps you'll hear his growl in the shadow of the steeple.

 Or perhaps you won't.

A Deluge of Dead Guys; or, What Do You Do With A Disused Churchyard? Part One: St. Paul's

If you're unfamiliar with St. Paul's Cathedral, watch this video and edumacate yourself.

This is literally the only thing you need to know about St. Paul's.

Ok, maybe not really. Here's a little more. St. Paul's is to the Anglicans what St. Peter's is to the Catholics. It sits on top of Ludgate Hill, the highest point in London, and for a long time was the tallest building in London. It has what is called a protected view- that is, new buildings can't go up if they will block somebody's line-of-sight to St. Paul's. The current building is the fifth cathedral to sit on the site and was designed by Christopher Wren. There has been a church on the site since at least 604 AD; this one has been there since the seventeenth century. The cathedral has an extensive crypt, where all manner of famous and important people are interred. (But, seeing as how I'm interested in marginalization, I honestly couldn't give a bent pin about them. Vivent les paysans!) It also has a very nice green surrounding it.

Roses, which will bloom soon.

A wonderful statue of Thomas Beckett. Becket? I am not too sure on the spelling of that.

Here we see the church partaking in one of those 'modern' burials where you just have a cloth on your face and your body is left for the birds to eat. Or maybe this fella's just napping.

However, its churchyard wasn't organized as the lovely garden it is now and landscaped until 1878.

What do you think it was before then?

Did you say graveyard?

(Please, please, please tell me that you said graveyard. If you've been following this blog at ALL, you said graveyard. If you haven't, well, then I forgive you. But, uh, given the title of the blog... you shoulda guessed graveyard anyways.)
 
It was a graveyard. And, as is the case in many of the city squares and greens that were once places of final rest, this one has several monuments still standing. However, most are very poorly conserved and are either partially or entirely illegible. In some cases, the writing is completely gone, and sometimes this is intentional. This is because many of the parks use the monuments as art pieces- they lend atmosphere and help keep the mood serious. It's hard to play handball when there's a mini-mausoleum in the way.

"But hold on a tick!" you might be saying. "Back up a bit. Mind explaining gravestone conservation to the rest of us normal people- the ones who DON'T spend their spare time hanging out in graveyards?"

Certainly! Many gravestones in active cemeteries are regularly grit-cleaned so that the information is readable. They are considered historically important because of the information on them, whereas in the churchyard parks, they are often not maintained because the aged look of the stone is what they're going for. It's entirely aesthetic. They can do this because the old churches kept immaculate, if illegible records of who was buried where. 

So, what's the condition of what was once the Anglican church's most important graveyard?

Let's take a look then, right.

I thought these were flat stones, left in place.

Whoops, turns out they're dry riser grates.

Cute little mini-maus...

That seems to be used for some kind of storage.

Nearly all of the stones are in terrible condition, writing-wise. Unless I zoom in, there's no words discernible to the naked eye, the camera lens, or the rubbings. Yes. I made rubbings.

A flat stone that might be a gravestone. Argument for: it's awkwardly flat and in the middle of a flower bed. Argument against: it's very uncharacteristically shaped and it's made using what looks to be blue shale, which isn't a period-accurate common material for gravestones, which were typically marble, granite, or slate.

What is even the point of this gate.

This is an example of a paired memorial, where the husband and wife share it. Memorials like these were exempt from the 1842 cemetery laws; as such, you often see later dates on them.

An example of the condition many of these monuments are in. Granite gavestones in the cemeteries that are nearly contemporary with this one are often still readable.

Seriously, this was carved only a year before the cemetery laws took effect.

There are no vertical headstones or flat ground slabs remaining in St. Paul's; along that line, there are no individual graves. All of the following monuments had at least two messes of engraving that were once hypothetically names/dates.

Here's an example of what I meant earlier. This guy, William Meller, Esq., was interred in 1850 because his family, who is listed on the stone's other three sides, were all interred earlier.

A zoom-out on Mr. Meller's side.

If you move widdershins, this was the side you saw.

The obverse of the Meller monument.

Many of the memorials were incorporated into the flower beds.

This one had a lot of names on it, all part of the Simmon family.

It seems that many of these remain because they couldn't be removed otherwise. Standing headstones are a lot easier to remove and a lot easier to put in a crypt storage room or hang on the wall. However, by using these pieces as part of the landscape, they do find a use for them, barring their original intent. People sit on these. They picnic on them. It's all very reminiscent of that scene in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil when the narrator and his guide around Savannah have a bourbon picnic on top of a gravestone shaped like a bench. It's a really nice old-world sort of attitude that keeps even these disused churchyards as active spaces that people engage with on a regular basis.

Even if it's just for a power-nap.

Coming Attractions

To all of you who are following this blog and wonder why the heck I don't talk about graveyards more, I have a present for you! It's a series I've been working on for a little while now about what happened to all those churchyards after they were no longer allowed to be used as burial grounds. Interspersed with this sequence will be my visit to the Guildhall area and a look at hellhounds. Next weekend will come a visit to Highgate (FINALLY. JEEZ.), a look at Jewish cemeteries, and hopefully, if all goes well, I'll have finished my Finding Neverwhere sequence. I'll also have some stuff from Kapow up, hopefully.

Also, later in the series, we'll see a cute duck and an anorexic TARDIS.

So, uh, keep watching is what I think that I am trying to say?