The Charterhouse

You're standing on top of twenty thousand bodies. In thirteen forty-eight, the Black Death arrived in London and killed roughly half the population. The churchyards couldn't cope. Mass burial pits were dug on the outskirts of the city, and this was one of the largest. An estimated twenty thousand plague victims were dumped here in layers, covered with quicklime, and buried.

We know this isn't just legend. In twenty thirteen, during excavations for the Crossrail railway project, archaeologists dug up skeletons from this site and extracted DNA. They found confirmed Yersinia pestis — the plague bacterium — in the bones. The Black Death is literally in the ground beneath your feet.

A Carthusian monastery was built over the burial pit in thirteen seventy-one. The monks lived in silence, each in his own cell, praying over the plague dead below. Then Henry the Eighth demanded they acknowledge him as head of the Church. The Carthusians refused. Prior John Houghton was hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn in fifteen thirty-five — one of the first martyrs of the English Reformation. The remaining monks who wouldn't sign were sent to Newgate Prison, chained upright to posts, and left to starve to death.

After the Dissolution, the monastery became a Tudor mansion. Then a school — Charterhouse School was founded here in sixteen eleven before moving to Surrey in eighteen seventy-two. And since sixteen eleven, it has also been an almshouse for elderly gentlemen, which it still is today. Eighty or so pensioners — called Brothers — live here in apartments arranged around the medieval cloister, on top of a plague pit, inside a monastery whose monks were starved to death. They have a very nice garden.