Cross Bones Graveyard: The Outcast Dead
Why is it significant?
Stop at the iron gates on Redcross Way and look closely. They are tied with hundreds of ribbons, scraps of fabric, beads, flowers and handwritten names, and a small plaque remembers the outcast dead. Behind them lies a strip of wild garden.
Key Facts
| Place | Cross Bones Graveyard: The Outcast Dead |
|---|---|
| Address | Redcross Way, London SE1 1TA, United Kingdom |
| Geo Coordinates | 51.50360, -0.09350 |
| Part of Walk | Shakespeare's Southwark: Bankside, the Globe and Tate Modern in London |
| Generated | Generated |
Stop at the iron gates on Redcross Way and look closely. They are tied with hundreds of ribbons, scraps of fabric, beads, flowers and handwritten names, and a small plaque remembers the outcast dead. Behind them lies a strip of wild garden. This is Cross Bones, a burial ground for the people nobody else would bury.
The story is that the single women of the Bankside stews, the Winchester Geese you met on Clink Street, were refused burial in consecrated ground and laid here instead. It is an old tradition, mentioned by the antiquarian John Stow around 1600, and historians still debate exactly where and when. What is certain is that by the eighteenth century this was a paupers' graveyard for the parish of St Saviour, so crammed with Southwark's poorest that it was closed in 1853 because it could hold no more.
In the 1990s, during work for the Jubilee line extension, archaeologists excavated a small part of the site. They found it packed with burials, layered one on top of another, a large share of them babies and young children, and the bones showed the marks of poverty and disease. Estimates of how many people lie here run to around fifteen thousand.
What happened next is pure Southwark. A local poet and playwright, John Constable, began holding vigils at these gates around the turn of the millennium, inspired by the Winchester Geese, and they have continued ever since, on the twenty-third of every month. Volunteers turned the wasteland into a small memorial garden, and the ribbons on the gates keep multiplying.
So the walk ends where Bankside's story truly belongs: not only with the playwrights, poets and bishops on the plaques, but with the watermen, actors, bear-keepers and the women of the stews who made this bank of the river London's playground. You started on a bridge built for the new millennium and you finish at a gate tied with ribbons for the forgotten dead. London Bridge station is a short walk to the east.