From covid to the 17th century Great Plague of London, history shows that epidemics don’t end neatly, but in oblivion. This is the case with covid, three years after it was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organisation. Unsurprising then, that for one street in east London, the Great Plague from roughly 350 years ago might never have happened.
On Pitfield Street, people bathe in the winter sunshine and walk their dogs on a warm afternoon. A small yellow sign put up by Hackney Council goes all but unnoticed. It warns: “Please Keep off the Grass. This is one of many burial grounds pertaining to the Black Plague 1665-1666.”
Pitfield Street was literally a plague pit, a mass grave for victims of the worst outbreak of plague in England since the Black Death of 1348. The Great Plague left more than 70,000 people, a fifth of London’s population, dead.
“If you didn’t tell me about the sign, I would have never noticed it,” 19-year-old Kaia, a local resident, told ELL. She shrugs. Even though she now knows about it, she adds it doesn’t make much difference. “I still don’t think anyone should live in fear.”
Today, Pitfield Street is an oasis of urban normality, with a local pub and a cinema it’s a pleasing alternative to the flash office buildings and clubs of Old Street, just a short walk away.
But when the Great Plague hit this area in 1665, this street would have been very different.
In fact, it didn’t exist. Not as Pitfield Street, a name that probably emerged from the area’s grim history as a pit for the bodies of plague victims. The first local mention of Pitfield was less than a half-century before the epidemic hit in 1665, according to Hackney Council. It says that a field named ‘Pitfield’ was on the site.
Noted diarist Samuel Pepys, who visited London that year, described what he saw in the city: “The people die so, that now it seems they are fain to carry the dead to be buried by day-light, the night not sufficing to do it in”.
When the Great Plague hit, Shoreditch, which includes present day Pitfield Street, was administered by the church.
According to the Yearly Bill for 1665, London’s official annual report on burials and causes of death in the city, the parish of St. Leonard Shoreditch recorded 1,949 plague burials in Shoreditch by December that year.
At the time, Pitfield Street must have been more like a path. If a visitor walked a few steps down it, to where the George and Vulture pub stands today, they would find themselves surrounded by fields. Today, it is hard to imagine those dark 17th century nights, when a wooden cart was towed through the wet mud, porters picking up dead bodies to transport to the fields and throw into the pits. An etching from more than a hundred years later, shows the dead being buried on the former grounds of a long-demolished abbey. The site appears to have been, by a Google Maps calculation, a bit more than 400 m from today’s Pitfield Street.
Scenes that possibly took place right where I enjoy a pint of Moretti today, thinking of happier stuff. But Pitfield Street is an example of how history is all around us, and sometimes, literally below our unheeding feet.
