Up to 50,000 sets of human remains could be exhumed during the construction of the new HS2 rail line between London and Birmingham, according to official estimates.
Plans for the £33 billion scheme will involve moving the whole of a Victorian cemetery at Park Street in Digbeth, Birmingham, in order to make room for the new Curzon Street terminal, while St James Gardens, a now-disused burial ground in Euston, will also be excavated.
This may seem rather macabre; however, such large-scale exhumations are actually very common in the construction industry, as this blog post will show.
Building on bodies
People have been being buried in Britain for centuries, particularly in our historic urban areas, so it shouldn’t be too surprising to learn that bodies are frequently unearthed during the excavation stage of construction projects.
Some graveyards are known about beforehand, from church records and historic maps, but many are discovered completely by surprise. Often no-one has been buried there for centuries and the land is now being used for something entirely different, giving the architects no warning.
If human remains are found, the legal process for removing them is actually quite complicated. The Ministry of Justice has to grant a licence to permit their removal, and then planning permission is still required on top of that. Other relevant organisations also need to be contacted if they have some authority over the land – heritage bodies such as the National Trust, or the Church if the land had been consecrated – as they usually have their own regulations governing these situations which need to be followed.
In recent years several major construction projects have unearthed huge numbers of bodies, such as the excavation of Spitalfields Market in east London, where 10,500 mostly Victorian and medieval human skeletons were dug up.
Most of them were removed to the Museum of London for study, rather than being reburied somewhere else – a potentially controversial move, although many people might argue that, as no-one remembers who these skeletons were as people any more, they no longer need to be commemorated.
Thomas Hardy
The Victorian author Thomas Hardy – best known for his bleak depictions of death and misfortune in Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure – famously wrote a poem called “The Levelled Churchyard” about the grim discoveries which are made when excavating old burial grounds.
It is widely believed to have been informed by Hardy’s own personal experiences, as before he became a writer he’d trained as an architect, and is known to have worked on the excavation of the graveyard at St Pancras Old Church when it was being dug-up to make way for the building of St Pancras railway station in the mid-1860s.
Amusingly, the poem humanises the remains which are being excavated by depicting them as suffering from confusion over who they are now that all their bones are being jumbled up:
The Levelled Churchyard
“O passenger, pray list and catch
Our sighs and piteous groans,
Half stifled in this jumbled patch
Of wrenched memorial stones!
“We late-lamented, resting here,
Are mixed to human jam,
And each to each exclaims in fear,
‘I know not which I am!’
“The wicked people have annexed
The verses on the good;
A roaring drunkard sports the text
Teetotal Tommy should!
“Where we are huddled none can trace,
And if our names remain,
They pave some path or p-ing place
Where we have never lain!
“There’s not a modest maiden elf
But dreads the final Trumpet,
Lest half of her should rise herself,
And half some local strumpet!
“From restorations of Thy fane,
From smoothings of Thy sward,
From zealous Churchmen’s pick and plane
Deliver us O Lord! Amen!”
