Tyburn

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This is one of a series of posts exploring different parts of London through photographs and words. Note that this particular post contains descriptions of violent deaths.

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The history of London is hidden underfoot.

A little while ago I sought out some of that history. I walked from the Old Bailey (the Central Criminal Court) to Marble Arch along Holborn and Oxford Street.

I was surrounded by the bustle and chaos of a busy town. At the beginning of my walk on the edges of the City of London, construction companies were wrapping up for the day but I could still hear the noise of machinery behind the hoardings. Later, on Oxford Street I tucked and dived between the commuters, tourists and shoppers.

Other people had made this same journey over the centuries, some of the unwillingly.

The Old Bailey is close to the site of Newgate Prison. It stood for over seven hundred years, opening in 1188 and closing its doors in 1902 and demolished two years later.

Marble Arch, now a busy gyratory at the junction of Oxford Street, Edgware Road, Bayswater Road and Park Lane, is close to the site of the Tyburn Tree. This innocuous sounding name masked its hideous intent; it was basically a mass killing machine, where multiple people could be executed at once.

The convicted would be held in Newgate Prison and then on the day of their execution (usually a Monday) taken in a cart through the streets of London to where they would meet their fate.

Over three thousand people would end their lives doing the “Tyburn jig”; they were not dropped to break their necks as in later executions, but merely left to choke to death as they hung there.

The first recorded execution was that of William Longbeard in 1196. He was part of a protest against rising taxes and would be one of many killed here for protesting against the established order.

The range of offences people could be hanged for was wide but a lot of them especially after the implementation of the Black Act of 1723 related to the theft of property. Sometimes this could be for very minor offences such as stealing food to eat, criminalising poverty.

I wanted to explore that final journey so many people took and so on a dark winter’s night I headed out from the Old Bailey. The actual route has changed a little but it is still possible to trace it on the ground.

You can view the route I took on Komoot here.

It must have been a chaotic and confusing experience for the convicted as they were paraded through the streets on the back of a cart. Some of them may have displayed a degree of bravado as they passed the noisy crowds that lined the route but all of them knew that their lives were no longer in their own hands and their fate awaited them at the end of the journey.

I tried to capture some of that chaos and confusion in the photographs I made.

The last person to be executed at Tyburn was John Austin in 1783. By then the area around the killing field had become gentrified and the new residents were concerned a weekly execution lowered the tone of the neighbourhood. The gallows were removed and the executions now took place within the walls of Newgate Prison.

One thing I noticed as I walked the route was how little there is on the ground in memory of those thousands of people who died here. At the end there is just a simple marker on a traffic island. London is renowned for its statues for the “great and good” – I passed one of Prince Albert, in a rather jaunty pose – but there are few for everyone else, the people. If history is written by the victors then the people who died at Tyburn were very much the losers.

I did notice, however, that someone had left a solitary rose on the marker.