DANCING ON THE DEAD: THE GRUESOME STORY OF ENON CHAPEL

What happens when a greedy Victorian clergyman with an eye for opportunity gets inspired by an open sewer in the middle of a London slum? From a dodgy burial scheme to dance parties held above a mass grave – here’s the gruesome story of Enon Chapel…

BURIAL CRISIS

In the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution turned London into the commercial capital of the world. Unfortunately, with people arriving faster than ever – and dying just as enthusiastically due to overworking, malnutrition and nasty diseases – the city quickly ran out of places to bury them.

Traditionally, Londoners were laid to rest in little graveyards around their parish churches. When these could no longer cope with demand, things got creative… in a very unsettling way. Slots, already packed tightly, were quietly reused every few weeks. Fresh corpses were discreetly redirected to anatomy schools, and older remains – ground up and sold as a garden fertiliser. (More details in my other article HERE!)

New graveyards popped up wherever a free space could be found, crammed behind hospitals and workhouses, run by parishes, Nonconformists or shady private undertakers.

CHURCH BUILT ON FILTH

At the time, waste from London buildings went into open sewers running through the middle of streets, flowing into rivers like the Fleet or the Walbrook. These, in turn, became wider sewers that eventually fed into the River Thames – essentially, an enormous one.

Alongside the usual household slop and everyday bodily by-products, these waterways also carried toxic waste from factories, blood and carcasses from slaughterhouses, and the occasional human remains – because why not?

Reverend William Howse, a Baptist minister with an eye for opportunity and enthusiasm for efficiency, came up with a brilliant business idea: to build a chapel directly over an open sewer, with the upstairs dedicated to worship and the downstairs reserved for burials.

He chose Clare Market, one of London’s worst slums. It was a tangle of narrow Elizabethan alleys and decaying buildings remembering the Great Fire, with dirt-besmeared walls, and broken windows patched with rags. Every small, filthy room inside was let out to a different family. Apparently, tenants changed every three or four months… because they died.

Enon Chapel, named after the biblical site of baptism, opened in 1823 on St Clement’s Lane. It was accessible through a filthy passage leading from the pillars opposite St Clement Danes church.

There were already a few burial grounds nearby, but Howse aggressively undercut his competitors, charging bargain prices – just fifteen shillings per burial, compared with nearly £2 at St Clement Danes. What’s more, church vaults were traditionally the most prestigious resting places, reserved for the wealthiest parishioners – yet with Reverend Howse, everyone had a chance to decompose in peace, safe from body snatchers and other horrors of London churchyards!

Needless to say, it was a smashing success, with up to twenty burials a week.

BIZARRE STENCH

Soon the Enon Chapel congregation began to notice… things.

Worshippers complained of an unbearable stench and a peculiar taste in their mouths during services. Praising the Lord with handkerchiefs pressed to their noses, some were still fainting. Samuel Pitts later recalled:

The smell was abominable and very injurious; I have frequently gone home myself with a severe headache, which I suppose to have been occasioned by the smell, more particularly in the summer time; also, there were insects… I have seen hundreds of them flying about the chapel; I have taken them home in my hat, and my wife has taken them home in her clothes.

These were FLESH FLIES (Sarcophaga carnaria). Children at Enon’s Sunday school were fascinated by how they crawled out from between the chapel’s creaky floorboards…

Residents about this spot, in warm and damp weather, have been much annoyed with a peculiarly disgusting smell… Vast numbers of rats infest the houses, and meat exposed to this atmosphere, after a few hours, becomes putrid.

– Weekly True, 22 August 1841

At some point, the issues with Enon Chapel became too much to ignore – even by Victorian London’s impressively low sanitary standards. Howse blamed the open sewer under the building, insisting the odour was simply the usual blend of human, animal and industrial waste found everywhere else in the city.

Finally, in 1839 inspectors from the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers looked beneath the chapel’s floor… and uncovered the Reverend’s disgraceful secret…

VAULT OF HORRORS

Over just sixteen years, Howse had crammed around 12,000 corpses into a vault measuring roughly 60 by 30 feet (18 by 9 metres), and only 6 feet (under 2 metres) deep. The rotting dead, separated from the congregation praying above by nothing more than a flimsy layer of wood, were stacked from floor to ceiling like sardines, naked, and with no coffins.

How’s that???

Well, coffins took up space. Plus, the cheeky Reverend and his wife reportedly used them as firewood to keep themselves cosy for free! As for the burial clothes, they were stripped off the corpses, boiled, and resold to poor. Nothing went to waste.

And when the space ran out, that handy open sewer proved very convenient…

KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON

Despite the sheer horror of this discovery, the vault was not closed, and the bodies were not removed. Instead, officials simply covered the sewer to prevent corpses from accidentally slipping into the water.

There. Problem solved!

Howse continued his profitable business, even expanding it with new methods of disposing the bodies – like speeding things up with quicklime. His workmen were paid to cart away wheelbarrows of decomposed human remains at night. Some were dumped into the Thames, others were used as landfill around major construction projects, including Waterloo Bridge.

The greedy Reverend carried on, handling up to 500 customers a year, until his death in 1842.

DANCING ON THE DEAD

After Howse’s death, the chapel’s building was leased to new tenants.

Mr Fitzpatrick moved in fully aware of the corpse-filled vault but was startled to discover vast quantities of human bones also beneath the kitchen floor. His solution was admirably pragmatic: he dug another two feet down into the basement and shoved the kitchen bones in there.

In 1844, the former chapel was taken over by members of the Irish Temperance Society, who converted the upper floor into a dance hall, reinforcing the original wooden floor with a layer of bricks and new boards over the mass grave below. Capitalising on the site’s macabre reputation, events were cheerfully advertised as “DANCING ON THE DEAD”.

Victorians loved it!

EXHUMATION SHOW

Of course, all good things must come to an end…

In 1848, George Alfred ‘Graveyard’ Walker, a surgeon and author of Gatherings from Graveyards (1838) exposing the appalling state of London’s burial grounds, bought the chapel promising to give the dead a proper burial.

However, rather than removing the remains discreetly, he turned the whole affair into a weeks-long public spectacle. His men paraded up and down the street holding skulls to attract attention, while exhumed remains were piled into a pyramid outside the chapel. Around 6,000 visitors paid to view the morbid display – with the corpse of Reverend Howse, identified by his distinctive “screw foot”, serving as the main attraction.

Four cartloads of bones were eventually removed and buried in a mass grave at the newly opened West Norwood Cemetery, all at Walker’s own expense. From a dodgy charnel house in the middle of a slum to prestigious “Millionaires’ Cemetery” – now that’s what you call a social upgrade!

ANOTHER NASTY SURPRISE

For some reason though, Walker didn’t quite finish the job…

When showman and circus owner ‘Lord’ George Sanger bought the chapel in 1850, planning to convert it into a pantomime theatre, he famously (and rather swiftly) abandoned the premises after discovering that some corpses were still in the basement.

The building later became a concert room and casino before finally being demolished in 1913. During the site’s redevelopment in the 1960s, more human remains were found.

Oopsie!

LEGACY AND AFTERLIFE

The Enon Chapel scandal played a crucial role in exposing the catastrophic state of London’s burial practices in a way no one could ignore. Walker’s testimony and campaigning contributed directly to the Burial Act of 1852, which shut down over 200 overcrowded inner-city graveyards, and allowed boroughs to create public cemeteries open to all social classes.

Its gruesome story lingered in the public imagination long after the chapel disappeared.

Today, the site of Enon Chapel lies at the southern end of Grange Court, at the top of the steps. It’s now part of the London School of Economics, which feels oddly appropriate: a grim, profit-driven experiment in ruthless efficiency reborn as a prestigious institution dedicated to studying exactly that.

I wonder if anyone has already written a dissertation on Reverend Howse’s innovative approach – perhaps “Optimising vertical integration in human storage to maximise revenue: lessons from Enon Chapel”?

A moral failure or a logistical triumph, what do you think?

Marta

MAIN SOURCES:

NECROPOLIS: LONDON AND ITS DEAD by C. Arnold (Pocket Books, 2007)
LONDON’S HIDDEN BURIAL GROUNDS by R. Bard & A. Miles (Amberley Publishing, 2017)
British Newspaper Archive