Arts Hub reviewer Rebecca Pohancenik goes to meet the city’s former inhabitants at the Wellcome Collection’s Skeletons: London’s buried bones.
London’s museums are filled with objects pillaged from the underground, that promising stratum of past human activity which yields up delights like a layer cake. But there’s a world of difference between visiting a nice display of Roman pottery shards, and coming face-to-face with the mortal remains of the people who made them.
The Wellcome Collection’s latest exhibition does just that, inviting us to get to know 26 of London’s former residents personally. Disinterred from their places of rest across the City, East and South London, their dates of death span sixteen centuries. Collected in one room they make a rather sober party, but the story they tell of London’s long past is an interesting one.
Selected from the Museum of London’s collection of 17,000, these skeletons exhibit all the infamous signs of a hard pre-modern life. There is syphilis, represented by the skeleton of a young woman with telltale holes in her skull, found in a 17th-century graveyard for prostitutes in Southwark. There is tuberculosis, in the body of a man whose right arm lays permanently across his body – not in a peaceful death pose, but because the elbow joint has been fused together by the disease. Plague takes its toll too quickly to leave a mark on the bones, but plague is represented here too, by inference; some of the skeletons come from mass graves dug n 1348 when London was ravaged by the Black Death.
But these skeletons here tell more than the statistics of their century. The rare emotive moment in this subdued exhibition happens when we can see these patterns of bones as former individuals, complete with personalities, predilections and foibles. A 19th-century Chelsea butcher was given to overeating. A young woman travelled to London from the Caribbean in the 1800s. A Roman man from about the 3rd century lived and worked (stoically? cursing his fate?) with a dislodged knee joint until giving up the ghost in his late 40s. Impoverished, corpulent, pregnant, coping – these were Londoners across the centuries.
Perhaps the most thought-provoking dimension of Skeletons is the connection drawn between past and present. These skeletons, evidence of changing centuries, were mostly discovered on the site of new building projects. Photographs by Thomas Adank show the present-day incarnation of each burial site. (Merton Priory, medieval centre of learning, is now the site of a Pizza Hut.) Supplementary information on the exhibition website points at all the burials that remain covered up by modern streets and buildings. We are, as it seems, literally living on a city of bones.
Skeletons: London’s buried bones is on until 28 September at the Wellcome Collection. If the mortality proves too much, take the last chance to see the accompanying exhibition From Atoms to Patterns, on display until 10 August. Showcasing the 1951 Festival Pattern Group and the introduction of scientific patterns into everything from carpets to fashion, the exhibition celebrates the conjunction of three happy circumstances – the end of the war, the empowerment of women, and the dawn of crystallography – and is as much about life as Skeletons is about death.
http://www.wellcomecollection.org/exhibitionsandevents
