This volume reports on excavations by MOLA prior to the redevelopment of council and public facilities on Marshall Street, Westminster, London. It is organised into nine chapters: an introduction to the site and excavation; a history of the parish of St James, Westminster; the development of an early 18th- to early 19th-century workhouse and the creation and closure of three burial grounds, one linked to the workhouse and two extramural parish grounds; the redevelopment of the workhouse in the early 19th- to early 20th-centuries; a history of the standing public baths on the site; an in-depth osteological report, a discussion chapter; a conclusion; and specialist appendices covering clay tobacco pipes, pottery, and the workhouse diet. Throughout these chapters, parish and workhouse documentary sources are integrated with the archaeological evidence.
The osteological report, at 78 pages long, is the largest chapter of the book (almost 25% of the main text). It presents data from the detailed analysis of 1,815 individuals, a subsample of the 2,553 excavated at the site, chosen based on the degree of skeletal preservation. The report contains information covering the demography of the individuals, their stature, evidence for health, disease and trauma, non-metric traits, and a brief demographic comparison of the three burial grounds. The burials of these individuals took place in the late 17th- to late 18th-century, a period underrepresented within archaeological data, when London underwent expansion, urbanisation, and industrialisation. The discussion chapter explores these themes and their intersection with life courses and health, both personal and public. The application of isotope analysis may have been a helpful addition for exploring these; however, the project predated incremental dentine analysis, and the size of the sample, combined with the probable analytical costs and project time frames, may have meant this was beyond the scope of what was feasible within the project. This would not be possible as further work, as the individuals excavated in this project were reburied upon the project's completion.
The text contains 170 figures and 67 tables illustrating plans of the parish and excavation, documentary and osteological evidence covering demographic and health information, as well as contemporary images of life in the workhouse. The full osteological data and its derived metadata, as well as 16 additional data tables referenced in the text, are available from the MOLA website. For those who work with osteological or health data, this volume will be of interest as a source of comparative data from a period underrepresented in British archaeology. Those with an interest in the history of urbanisation and industrialisation, or the history of public and personal health and medicine, or more broadly, the history and development of London, may also find this text to be a valuable and interesting resource.