London's dead dug up for new book

3:04pm Friday 4th April 2008

MILLIONS have lived and died in London over the past 2,000 years - but some have died more publicly than others.

In London's Dead - A Guided Tour of the Capital's Dead, Ed Glinert walks the reader from City to West End, along the banks of the Thames and around the suburbs.

Stopping off at great historical sites and incongruous unmarked spots, he remembers the most remarkable deaths in London.

Glinert, from Dalston, has already written the London Compendium, East End Chronicles, West End Chronicles and Literary London, and gives each corner of the capital equal billing, although his evident love of history centres the book on the square mile and Westminster.

The book's real highlights are its more eccentric passages, frequently coloured by the chaos of this densely-crowded city.

One such is this account of 1780s Gor-don Riots, when a mob broke into a Holborn brewery and "rolled out the casks and smashed them open.

"The raw spirit caught fire, sending pillars of flame up to the sky and hot gin running down the road.

"Locals who gorged themselves on the spoils were soon screaming from internal burns and keeling over, dead drunk or just dead.

"When firefighters atta-ched their hoses to taps in the cellars the blaze burned fiercer: the taps were connected to a supply of gin."

Three years later, Irish nationalist Michael Barrett, was found guilty of killing six and injuring scores with a bomb planted at the Clerkenwell House of Detention.

Glinert describes it as the first-ever terrorist attack on mainland Britain - Barrett's execution at Newgate prison was the city's last-ever public hanging.

Waltham Forest's entries are few, and all associated with the Krays.

Glinert notes that Ronnie's funeral courtege made its way to Chingford Mount Cemetery via the Bow flyover, possibly to draw attention to the bones of Frank the mad axeman' Mitchell, rumoured to be buried under its concrete structure. In another entry, Reggie visits the cemetery to tend the grave of his wife, Frances, and spots a bird, which he believes is her spirit, reincarnated.

Ronnie, Reggie and Charlie Kray are all buried at Chingford Mount along with their mother and other members of their family.

More famous recent events will be remembered by many readers - the 2005 terrorist attacks, the King's Cross fire of 1987, and the killing of Harry Stanley, shot in Hackney in 1999 by police who thought the chair leg he was carrying was a gun.

All receive the same evocative but factual treatment as the more obscure, older incidents.

London's Dead - A Guided Tour of the Capital's Dead, by Ed Glinert, is available in hardback priced £12.99 from HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0-00-725497-2.

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