Sleeping with the Dead

Sleeping with the Dead is an act of remembrance for those bodies reinterred from Bedlam Burial Ground, London (active 1569 to 1738) to Willow Cemetery, Canvey Island.

The project provides a comfortable space to sleep with the dead while listening to donated heartbeats and under-grave sounds.

When £18.5 billion was invested in Crossrail to build Transport for London’s Elizabeth Line, part of the Bedlam burial ground was unearthed (active 1569 to 1738). The full site contained approximately 25,000 bodies during its 180 years of active use which represented a large proportion of Londoners at the time. The cemetery contained the remains of the poor, the rebellious, diseased, dissenters and the mad. Many people living in Essex will be descended from the disarticulated remains of 3000 people who were respectfully disenterned by T Cribb & Sons in 2016. This jumble of bones were thought to have no specific scientific value or interest at the time and were reburied in a mass grave at Willow Cemetery on Canvey. The soil from the London site was shipped to Wallasea Island, to help build a new RSPB nature research in the Essex Archipelago.

YoHa, a local artist group with an international reputation for pioneering arts projects, are proposing a remembrance of those in the mass grave including the Levellers, John Lilburne and Robert Lockyer and herbalist Nicholas Culpeper at Canvey during Estuary 2025. This will involve a series of workshops and talks, listening to underground sounds and donated heartbeats. YoHa have been collaborating with staff and young people from Canvey youth club Yellow Door, and Goldsmiths, University of London students to find ways to record heartbeats for the remembrance during the festival. YoHa is also working with local writers, sound artists and archaeologists and T Cribb for a weekend of talks and workshops on 28 & 29 June 2025.

“Like the rest of us, now the dead are banished from that unaffordable city.
Let Canvey awaken from this pay-to-go coma and escape a history made against us.
Let's record a multitude of heartbeats in remembrance of the poor, mad,
rebellious and diseased that lay beneath us in Willow Cemetery. Let's
reunite the soil of Wallesea with the Mass Grave on Canvey.
Let's pump each heartbeat into the ground so each worm sings the praise
of the bones of the dead. Unforgetting rhythmic hearts, redeeming our
past, provoking the present, to break with the silence that hides the
violence hidden beneath a progress to nowhere.
Let's rescue Canvey's past from oblivion, listen in those heartbeats to the
before, echoes of our footsteps on London’s streets all those years ago.
Let's listen again to those who came before, the dead who anticipated our
arrival.” 
YoHa, 2025

Events programme

Saturday 28th June:

11am: John Cribb and Robert Hartle in conversation with YoHa

12.30-1pm: Listening to heartbeats and under-grave sounds. YoHa, Stuart Bowditch

2-4pm: Workshops: Syd Moore, Sylak Ravenspine, Lora Aziz

4.30-5pm: Listening to heartbeats and under-grave sounds. YoHa, Stuart Bowditch

Sunday 29th June

11am-12:30pm: Tom King and Tim Burrows in conversation with YoHa

12:30-1pm: Listening to heartbeats and under-grave sounds. YoHa, Stuart Bowditch

2-4.30pm Workshops: Jill Westwood & Lesley Morris, Sylak Ravenspine, Lora Aziz

4.30-5pm: Listening to heartbeats and under-grave sounds. YoHa, Stuart Bowditch

Project Image: YoHa (Matsuko Yokokoji, Graham Harwood), Sleeping with the Dead, 2025, YoHa.