10 Things You Didn’t Know About The London Underground

The Great Plague tore through London like wildfire in 1665.

With the dead piling up and no idea what to do with them, great holes named "plague pits" were dug and the infected bodies were simply thrown in them, left to rot.

One of the areas of London worse affected by the disease was Aldgate, home today to a station on the Metropolitan and Circle Lines. The station is right next to a St. Botolph's Church, which reportedly housed a plague pit with over 1,000 bodies in it.

It is said that, whilst construction was underway on the station, diggers stumbled across the pit and the thousands of bones left there haphazardly. Not to be deterred by this, they carried on digging, and the station opened in 1876.

Whilst this is still considered an urban myth by some, there is significant evidence Aldgate plague pit did in fact exist. Documents have been found detailing the payments the church received for digging plague pits and it's even written about in Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, which is based on his uncle's real-life diaries.

And even if it is just a myth, it's a damn good one.