Lessons from Crossbones Graveyard: a more-than-individuated ethics of care

By Hannah Reeves, Birbeck, University of London

Tucked away along a medieval lane just south of London Bridge is a graveyard like no other in the city. On Redcross Way stands a towering rust-red iron gate, holding a mass of frayed, mildewed ribbons together as shrine. With every slight breeze that passes through them, the shrine comes alive with movement. Each undulation reveals glimpses of the graveyard within: a Madonna enveloped by a hand-carved, womb-like wooden shelter, ragged hollyhocks flailing around behind her; a flush of evening primrose breaking out of cracks in the concrete; sweet peas and hops climbing up to join the ribbons on the gates.

This is the site of Crossbones Graveyard, one of London’s many overused and abused post-medieval burial sites. Having been used intensively by the local parish as a pauper’s burial ground between the 17th and 19th centuries, Crossbones was closed in 1853 due to its extremely overcrowded state. Although the original footprint of the burial site is only around the size of three tennis courts, it is estimated to hold the remains of around 15,000 people. After its closure, it was “capped off” with lime mortar that was intended to seal in the dead, who in some areas of the site were buried within two feet of the surface. When Crossbones was subsequently sold on for industrial redevelopment, the dead would erupt intermittently as the ground was broken to commence building works. This was purportedly a shock for the developers in question, whose apparent ignorance of the site’s history was contested by other local residents (Brickley et al., 1999, pp. 9, 19).

By the early 1990s, Transport for London had acquired Crossbones Graveyard as a works site. As the new landowners had thousands of burials disinterred to build an electricity substation on the eastern half of burial ground, local residents began a concerted campaign to protect the remaining part of the site. From 1998, a ceremony known as “the Halloween of Crossbones” was performed at the gates on Redcross Way, led by local writer John Constable and based on his poems inspired by the site (Constable, 1999). Ribbons were tied to the gates, lovingly inked with the names of local people who had died while Crossbones was actively in use for burials. This constituted the emergence of a dynamic shrine, marking out the apparently derelict site as sacred space. History remembers people with names, and the activists who worked to protect the dead at Crossbones knew this: they did not know with certainty whether those people were buried at Crossbones or another of the parish’s burial sites, but they deserved to be remembered, and there were people at Crossbones who deserved to be remembered too. Hanging names on the gates called out to passers-by that individuals were encased there under asphalt and concrete; individuals who were worthy of their attention and perhaps even their care.

The annual ritual of hanging ribbons to the gates grew into a monthly vigil, intended to keep the gates replenished with a continual flow of fresh ribbons as older ones decayed. The vigils have evolved as a place for local people to ‘honour the Outcast, both dead and alive’ (Friends of Crossbones, 2019): attendees gather to remember and cherish what history casts out, from disremembered lives lived on society’s margins, to the parts of themselves that are not welcome according to the dominant social order of their day. The gates they sustain aesthetically embody the transience of a roadside memorial, which paradoxically persists thanks to ongoing and visible care. The names of those buried several hundred years ago are now joined by names of people who died only a few years, months, or weeks ago: people remembered as connected with the figure of the Outcast in some way, or often simply people who were loved by those who tend the site today. Over 18 years since the first vigil took place in 2004, the vigils still take place at the gates every month. The vigils bring together long-time attendees with newly local residents, transient visitors, and pilgrims for the Outcast inspired by the expansive possibilities of street communion.

The impossibility of ever establishing a complete or precise picture of who was buried at Crossbones Graveyard is a condition enforced by a dominant historiography, whose authors held the privilege of determining the terms through which its subjects entered the archive. The names of individuals were recorded, but in many cases the archive reduces these individuals to their names, stripped of the texture of lived experience and supplemented only with administrative markers such as their date of death and address. Faced with the violence of this erasure, the Friends of Crossbones have transformed this enforced indeterminacy into a site of potential. In a typical graveyard, a name set in stone - marking the grave of a bounded individual - inscribes the limitations of who should grieve for them and how. At Crossbones, where individuals are woven into the site’s industrial fabric and through each other, interacting with the dead according to the prescribed logic of the graveyard is impossible. The Friends of Crossbones have therefore been forced to work in the cracks, giving rise to an expansive transgenerational community of living and dead connected with the site.

After several years of holding vigils outside the gates, the Friends of Crossbones were eventually able to access the burial ground within, with help from a TfL security guard gone rogue. This “invisible gardener,” it transpired, had already begun the work of cultivating a garden on site. As the Friends of Crossbones navigated their priorities alongside the invisible gardener, they were led by the teachings of the “wild” that was already at work there. Having found their way into the cracks between the layers of lime, opportunistic wild plants had made a home on the footprint of the burial ground. Most prominently, the graveyard was overgrown with Buddleia davidii, that most tenacious plant so often seen sprouting from the lime mortar that holds much of our urban landscape together. Where seeds gained a foothold in the cracks, they taught Crossbones’ human caregivers that these points of rupture offer fertile terrain: a place where the life gets in. The flourishing of these little habitats gave rise to an ethics of cultivation that embraces imperfection for its radical potential. At Crossbones, marginal lives are honoured and protected, and so the “weeds” that thrive in the cracks are welcomed in.

As buddleia leaves fell to the ground and mingled with brick dust, snail shells, broken glass and bone, soils began to develop in cracks and crevices, gradually producing a more hospitable environment for a diverse range of species. Watching these entangled life cycles taught the site’s human caregivers an ethics of circularity: as the dead below are part of the ecosystem above, what grows on Crossbones should stay on Crossbones. As they cut paths through the thicket of buddleia, the cuttings were used to build magic circles. Years later, as buddleias were cut back in preparation for opening the garden to the public, their mature branches were used to build a protective shelter.

The ethics of cultivation that developed in response to these ecological cycles fluidly and expansively extended to the urban debris the activists found on site. As they established shrines, they were led by the material residue of the site’s difficult past, responding to the fullness of its histories rather than sanitising it in the name of healing. A rusty cabinet became a shrine for addicts; the exposed surface of a wooden hoarding became a shrine “for all suicides”; “infinity beds” were built from rubble that had been churned up through the site’s history of development and abandonment. A crumbling pyramid decked with oyster shells remembers the times when oysters were a staple food of the local working class before being overfished to near extinction.

Immersed in the bustling post-industrial ecology of the garden of remembrance, visitors are steeped in the knowledge that the dead are not fragments floating in a distant past but are participating in the world right now. Their still-decomposing remains alter the composition and structure of the soil as they mingle with microorganisms, causing certain plants to thrive or struggle in particular areas of the garden. Their DNA moves with the creatures who are frequently moving from below the surface to above and back again. Living visitors to the garden enter into presence with the dead as they breathe in the oxygen these very plants breathe out. The dead erupt as cherry blossoms coming into bloom in Spring, as flowers bursting from cracks in the concrete in Summer, and as green growth drying out to brown in Autumn.

Cultivating the garden of remembrance asked Crossbones’ human caregivers to work with ‘response-ability’ to what they found there. ‘Response-ability’ asks us to lean into the mutual emergence of our very existence, which involves taking on ‘the risk of being for some worlds rather than others and helping to compose those worlds with others’ (Haraway, 2016, p. 178). Attending to the intimate unfolding of human and nonhuman relations at the site – between living and dead, organic and inorganic – gave rise to capacious forms of recognition and care for the dead. In becoming response-able to what they found on site, the Friends of Crossbones developed patterns of ‘remembering who lives and who dies and how’ (Haraway, 2016, p. 28) that were not tied to the logic of the individual.

Today, the garden continues its dynamic fluctuations: ‘like life itself, it’s a work in progress’ (Friends of Crossbones, n.d.). Volunteer gardeners tend to Crossbones every week, working with its established ethics of cultivation while remaining responsive to the provocations the site throws up. In showing up to cultivate the resting place of the Crossbones dead, the community at Crossbones mutually articulate an ethics of care for the dead, for the local ecology, and for objects that might otherwise be thought of as worthless. At the same time, Crossbones offers its human caregivers an oasis of calm in an intensely urban environment, a rare opportunity to develop deep and sustained connections with a biodiverse gaggle of nonhuman inhabitants, and an anchor for local community that spans generations and timescapes.

Crossbones Graveyard offers a microcosm of remediation in a damaged macrocosm. Unlike a monument set in stone, its histories are continually written by its more-than-human, more-than-living, ‘more-than-individuated’ (Kaishian and Djoulakian, 2020) participants. Its ruination is still present, and it continues to call out for care. At Crossbones, we find an ethics of cultivation that is rooted in the specificity of its response-ability to its more-than-individuated inhabitants. Care for the dead is inextricable from care for the ecosystem, care for place and care for community. That we might be able to nurture ‘life in capitalist ruins’ (Tsing, 2015) is possible and palpable. At the garden, this potentiality is felt in the bodies of those who enter it, reminding us that that the work to address global crises begins with shifting into more ethical relations at the scale of the very small and very local.

 To read more about the grassroots campaign to protect Crossbones Graveyard, visit the Friends of Crossbones at crossbones.org.uk.

For information about visiting Crossbones Graveyard, events and volunteering, visit Bankside Open Spaces Trust.

References

Brickley, M., Miles, A., Stainer, H., 1999. The Cross Bones burial ground, Redcross Way Southwark, London: archaeological excavations (1991-1998) for the London Underground Limited Jubilee Line Extension Project, MoLAS monograph. Museum of London Archaeology Service and Jubilee Line Extension Project, London.

Constable, J., 1999. The Southwark Mysteries. Oberon Books, London.

Friends of Crossbones, 2019. Testimony.

Friends of Crossbones, n.d. History: Crossbones, the strange but true story behind the Garden of Remembrance [WWW Document]. Crossbones. URL http://crossbones.org.uk/history/ (accessed 4.19.19).

Haraway, D., 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, London.

Kaishian, P., Djoulakian, H., 2020. The Science Underground: Mycology as a Queer Discipline. Catal. Fem. Theory Technoscience 6. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v6i2.33523

Tsing, A., 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton University Press, New Jersey.