http://www.planetslade.com/cross-bones.html

PlanetSlade's second free book went up online this week at the link above. It's a 70,000-word history of Southwark's remarkable Cross Bones burial ground, and here's what it's all about:

South London's Cross Bones graveyard began life as a dumping ground for the Bishop of Winchester's dead whores.

For over four centuries, this Southwark burial ground's neighbourhood was home to London's legalised brothels, policed and taxed by the 12th century's Bishop William Gifford and his successors. Nicknamed "Winchester Geese" to reflect the Bishop's role as their master, the girls who worked these brothels were nonetheless refused burial in consecrated ground. Their bodies ended up at Cross Bones instead.

Since then, the horribly over-stuffed site has been used for the parish's pauper burials, pressed into service as a plague pit and targeted by London's most notorious gang of resurrection men. The surrounding streets have hosted Shakespeare's own theatre, the Victorians' most notorious slums and the wildest acid house parties of the 1990s.

Today, this medieval burial ground is a shrine to our own era's outcast dead, where 50,000 people a year attend regular vigils led by a shamanic local writer and attach their own offerings to the site gates. All this makes Cross Bones one of the most fascinating, yet least understood, graveyards in London.