Located under glass beneath a modern square just to the north-east of the line of the City of London’s walls are the ruins of a medieval building which once held human bones.
Built on what had originally been a Roman burial ground, the medieval hospital known as St Mary Spital was constructed towards the end of the 12th century and a graveyard was located on the site for the burial of those who died there.
A small chapel was built on the site in about 1320, the crypt of which became a charnel house housing the bones of those remains disturbed when
The hospital, which had been run by Austin canons, was dissolved by King Henry VIII in 1539 and most of the bones removed. The crypt was later used as a house which was demolished around 1700 and later lost between the gardens of terraced houses.
The remains of the charnel house was discovered in the late 1990s during excavation works – complete with some 10,000 skeletons – and now lies under a glass floor in Bishop’s Square just to the west of Spitalfields Market (it can also be seen through a glass window in the basement level accessed via stairs in the square).
Two statues can be seen inside the ruins – a greenish figure crouching over a prone purple-red figure. Installed in 2014, they are the work of David Teager-Portman and are called Choosing the Losing Side and The Last Explorer.
Spitalfields Chapel and Charnel House, Bishops Square, London, Spitalfields (nearest Tube station is Liverpool Street; nearest Overground is Liverpool Street and Shoreditch High Street).
Exploring London 