DIG DEEP

The team behind Europe’s largest construction project is building new tunnels beneath London’s roads every week, but another group is working with them, too. Harry Wallop talks to the Crossrail archaeologists about woolly mammoths and Roman roads

- Harry Wallop

DURING September 1665, the plague in London reached its very worst peak, with the hot, late-summer weather combining with the disease to create deadly conditions. Parliament and Charles II had fled the capital. At one point during that month, more than 1,000 Londoners were dying, every day.

One was a girl called Mary Godfree, who died on Saturday, September 2. Despite all the images of mass plague pits, of carts loaded high with ‘bring out your dead’, Godfree was accorded a proper burial. We know this because her headstone was discovered five years ago during one of the biggest engineering projects of the 21st century: Crossrail.

‘We had always thought during this great pandemic that people were buried in mass ceremonies,’ explains Marit Leenstra, one of the archaeologists working on the project, and now a project manager at the MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology). ‘We thought they were simply thrown into holes. But this little girl, no more than nine years old, had a gravestone carved and inscribed for her. It wasn’t that harsh; people really cared for her. I thought that was very touching— especially from today’s perspective of being in a pandemic.’

Crossrail, the 73-mile railway that runs from Abbey Wood and Shenfield in Essex in the east to Heathrow and Reading, Berkshire, in the west, has been a hugely complex engineering project, which will finally become operational in the first half of 2022 (intensive trial runs begin next year). It has involved the digging of 26 miles of tunnels under some of London’s busiest streets and the construction of 10 new railway stations, in an attempt to slash journey times across the capital. It has gone over time and over budget. But one aspect of the project has not: the archaeological digs.