What Lies Beneath London’s Liverpool Rail Station? | National Geographic

[Music] People are surprised about what lies beneath London, especially when they find human remains. The Liverpool Street Station is one of the most important for archaeology because we're right in the heart of the ancient city here. The cemetery was in use at least 150 years, and during that time, there were at least four recorded outbreaks of Bubonic plague in London, including the Great Plague of 1665, in which perhaps 20% of London's population died in a matter of months.

Certainly, we've got many victims of that particular event here. This cemetery allows us to look at something that hasn't really been looked at before, and that is the DNA of the plague pathogen Yersinia pestis. We can take a tiny sample from a tooth, and now we can compare the DNA with examples of people who died from plague in the last two millennia. It's important for us to understand the evolution of infectious diseases over time, and perhaps also understand how it might change in the future.

We have a database of names of people we know who are buried here. The ultimate goal is to try and connect an individual skeleton to a known biography. Most of the burials are completely anonymous. We've only found half a dozen fragments of small gravestones where the details of the person are kind of etched on. Dying and being buried was a serious financial impact on poorer families in the 16th and 17th century, so this was the cheapest place.

We'll be taking a sample of those skeletons and doing a full comprehensive analysis because whilst we have human remains for the medieval occurrence of the plague and for the late 18th and 19th centuries after it, we have this huge gap in our knowledge that this site will help us to fill. Our job is to look at the bones themselves and record what diseases they had, how healthy they were, what type of injuries they suffered during their lives.

This first skeleton was an adult female who, at the time of death, was suffering from venereal syphilis. This was an adult male; he suffered a severe blow to the head, resulting in blunt force trauma. It's very important that we take time to study our past, whether it's in documents or whether it is in the ground, because the more we know about our past, the more we know who we are, the more we can understand about our future.