Managing Landscape

People, no matter where they are, have to engage with their landscape. Even nomads change the land around them in one way or another- there's just no escaping it. The way a landscape is altered is highly indicative of cultural values. If I may, I'm going to direct you to two features near Guildhall. The first is the landscaping directly outside of the Guildhall itself.

 That lovely little marsh there is right outside of this:

Interesting, I think. On one hand, you have this clean, crisp white building with its neogothic face and vertical lines. Outside of it, you have this sprawling water garden with paved paths and black marble. The organic forms of the plants and the anatine visitors combined with the peaceful curves of the water provide a welcome contrast to the Guildhall area's neoclassical and neogothic architecture.

They like to do this in London. They build spires in the middle of the street that look like subterranean churches. I have no idea how or why they do this, but they do.

I think by demonstrating this, I'm effectively explaining why London's greenspace is so vital to its continued existence. Humans are a complex bunch. We need variety and we also need fresh air. The greenspaces are natural havens in an industrial city. And London, thanks to lessons from the early years of the Industrial Revolution, has learned very much why places where the air can purify are important. Do you guys know about peppered moths?

I didn't take this picture- the BBC did. This is a representation of the light and melanistic forms of the peppered moth. Before the Industrial Revolution, the light form was the most common, with less than one percent of moths showing melanism. But during the Industrial Revolution, the belching factory smoke stained everything dark. The melanistic moths rose in frequency until they outnumbered the light moths. This trend continued until 1962, when Britain reported the first decline of the dark moths in about a hundred years. This has happened in America as well, separately from the European moths. As well as being an excellent example of forced selection and microevolution, it's a very visible warning of the dangers of damaging the landscape with pollutants. Urban greenspace represents humanity's understanding of these issues, I think.

But, like I sorta said before, it's not just ecological issues that make greenspace so important. It's also psychological!

What, you didn't think you'd get out of this without being subjected to looking at gravestones, did you?

I promise, though. Only two.

 This former burial ground is now maintained by one of London's professional guilds: The Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths. Rather than highlighting its natural form or its past as a churchyard, they chose to landscape it formally, turning it into a proper small garden.

Side note to my friend Amanda: This is the only memorial to newspaper publishers in London.

Most of the Guildhall area squares don't follow such a rigid form, but seeing this formal garden architecture is a reminder of human impact on our landscape. This is obviously what the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths sees as relaxing and peaceful. And it is- it's a quiet space that smells nice and is partially sunken into the ground. The manicured part of the garden- the part without the graves- is essentially subterranean, separating the people who choose to use it from the main thoroughfare above. It creates this removed space for them, allowing them to detach from the business world and have a moment of tranquility. With stress being as serious a worry as it is these days, and inactivity contributing to all kinds of unwellness (including obesity and mental distress), a place to walk and hide from the world's realities must be a welcome relief.

Living History

He wasn’t supposed to feed the birds. The slick black plastic placard at the gate told him that, as did a smaller, brassy one that had a sooty blush on it from years of exposure to the London atmosphere. But he’d come to London from a small town in Canada, and they didn’t have pigeons there- at least not pigeons like these, in their millions. So he ripped off a morsel of his boxed sandwich and rolled it between his fingertips, then flicked the crumbled bits to the ground. A fat pigeon landed nearby, blinking stupidly up at him before pecking at the paving stones in the bench’s shadow and was soon joined by another and then another and then another… but the pigeons didn’t bother anybody, being little more than a part of the visual landscape. They didn’t bother the man with  the Rastafarian cap and Ray-Bans, who dozed on the grass nearby, his headphones leaving him oblivious. They didn’t bother the trio of women stretched, catlike, in yoga poses and talked about circular breathing and tea-tree oil. They didn’t bother the interns near the gateway, dressed in their three-piece suits and serious, professional Guildhall mannerisms. But they delighted the young man who, having come to London, the great city of the world, could find nothing more suitable and enjoyable than taking his lunch in the open air and sharing it with pigeons. But the others didn’t notice his smile, didn’t notice his momentary pride in flaunting the rules and feeding the birds. They hardly noticed him, and why would they? They, like all people, had all come to this park, this city for their own reasons, no two alike. They came to work, came to shop, came to protest, came to tour, came to live. They were aware that others in the past had come to London for all of these reasons and more, but they didn’t really think about them. London, to them, was a right here and a right now, and would continue to be such until they left it in one way or another. Nobody stopped to think about the people of the past or of the future… but that didn’t change the fact that they were still there and still important. There wasn’t a one of them there that knew that beneath the park’s grassy turf and flagstoned paths lay hundreds and hundreds of skeletons, for Postman’s Park, nearly a yard above the current street level, was built of the disused churchyards of Old London.

It is not alone in this; London has limited space, and for it to remain current, it must understand how to incorporate the old with the new. The city of London- the boroughs and the Square Mile- is far more interconnected than one would think. Unlike the planned cities and suburbs so prevalent in the United States, London is an organic city. It’s dynamic, alive even. Its human elements cannot be ignored; people don’t just come to this city to work, they come to live, just as we have. But you miss so much if you live in a place without making the effort to understand it. In our one required course, Global London, we are given the chance to have an amazing understanding of the way the city functions as a business and as a residence. Our talented and knowledgeable instructors work as a team to give us the tools we need to engage with the city, its economy, and its residences. But other things we must discover on our own. We must teach ourselves, however we can, what it truly means to be a citizen of a global city, and this is why the history that oozes down the Portland walls of grand houses, that rises like a pea-soup fog from the last mudflats along the Thames, that seeps out from the cracks in the remaining cobblestones is so very crucial to our understanding of the city. It was this quest for understanding that led me to Postman’s Park that afternoon.

I’d gone down to Guildhall for reasons unknown. It had just been a place that I hadn’t been yet, which made it important to me.

It was a lovely place, but as I wandered around and watched the people come and go, I began to wonder what it really was. It seemed to be one of those places where you were now, or you would be later, but it didn’t really mean much on an individual level. It was a place to exist, not a place to be. So as impressive as it was, I eventually wandered away to go find a park to relax in. London, I am convinced, has the best parks in the world, and Postman’s Park is no exception.

This little one with a fountain near its gates seemed delightful; populated but not crowded, with enough places to stop and sit and relax for a while. I found a bench, sat down, rummaged through my bag for some chewing gum… and then I saw them. Rows and rows of them.

I wasn’t surprised to see them. I’m an archaeologist, after all; I find nothing frightening or even out-of-place about grave markers. But seeing them made me think once again of the people who had come to this place before me. Guildhall might have been impressive, but it was a building, its spires reaching into the sky. It had little personal connection to anybody. But each of those simple markers represented a person- sometimes two. They embodied the people of London before and of London yet to come and the man with the pigeons and the women doing yoga. They are the everyday people, and for us to understand London, we must never forget that.

In America, our cemeteries are neat and tidy. In older places, like the costal towns, we might have a true churchyard or two, but often these are paved over and forgotten, until the ground is dug into again and the lives are rediscovered. We tend to think that steel and glass are what we need- that we must constantly push to be modern and to be on the cusp. But here in London, they understand that there’s no way to hide the people that made it a global city in the first place. Many monuments might have been repurposed or lost, but the memory is immortal. We can talk all we like about gentrification and urban development, but we can’t forget who came before us. London won’t let us.

(This is a quick little photoessay that I wrote for a contest. I like the way it reads, but I wish that I could have made it longer.)

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!