London's execution ground
Tyburn, now a traffic island and pavement near Marble Arch in London, was England's principal execution ground for nearly 600 years. The first recorded hanging took place there in 1196 and the last in 1783, after which the Tyburn Tree gallows, a triangular structure able to hang 24 people at once, was abandoned for Newgate.
The first recorded hanging here took place in 1196
Tyburn is now just a name on a map, marking a vanished village near where Marble Arch stands today. For almost 600 years, this crossroads was London's main place for hanging criminals and traitors. The first recorded execution happened here in 1196, when William Fitz Osbert, who had led an uprising in London, was dragged naked behind a horse and hanged.
The site took its name from the River Tyburn, a small stream that once ran through the area. Tyburn was a real village, listed in the Domesday Book in 1086. It sat at the junction of two Roman roads, now Edgware Road and Oxford Street. For centuries, people convicted in London and Middlesex were marched here from Newgate Prison, often in a cart, past jeering crowds.
In 1537, Henry VIII used Tyburn to execute leaders of the Pilgrimage of Grace, a revolt against his break from the Catholic Church. Then in 1571, workers built a new kind of gallows here: a wooden triangle on three legs, strong enough to hang 24 people at once. It became known as the Tyburn Tree.
A hundred and five Catholic martyrs died on this ground
Over the next hundred years, the Tyburn Tree became the main place where Catholics died for their faith. Edmund Campion, a Jesuit priest, was hanged here in 1581. Anne Line, a Catholic widow who sheltered priests, died here in 1601. In total, 105 Catholic martyrs were executed at Tyburn between 1535 and 1681.
The crowds that gathered to watch were enormous, sometimes numbering in the tens of thousands. Spectator stands charged admission for a better view. Once, a stand collapsed, reportedly killing and injuring hundreds of onlookers. After a hanging, crowds sometimes fought surgeons over the bodies, afraid that dissection would stop the dead from rising on Judgment Day.
In January 1661, the already-dead bodies of Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton and John Bradshaw were dug up and hanged at Tyburn. Parliament ordered it as revenge for their part in executing King Charles I. Cromwell's corpse was then beheaded, and his body was dumped in a pit at the foot of the gallows.
A highwayman was the last person hanged here
By the 1700s, hangings at Tyburn happened eight times a year, and crowds along the way treated the condemned's last ride almost like theater. A journey from Newgate Prison along Oxford Street, then called Tyburn Road, could take three hours through the mob. In 1740, the pickpocket Jenny Diver was hanged here with twenty other convicts before a huge crowd. In 1760, a nobleman named Lord Ferrers was hanged at Tyburn for murdering his own steward, a rare case of a peer facing the same gallows as a common thief.
The portable gallows replaced the fixed Tyburn Tree in 1759, built and taken down for each hanging. On November 7, 1783, a highwayman named John Austin became the last person executed here. After nearly 600 years, London moved its hangings to Newgate Prison itself, ending the public spectacle at this crossroads for good.
An ancient boundary stone vanished after Marble Arch moved here
The crossroads carried an older marker too: Oswulf's Stone, a standing stone that gave its name to the Ossulstone Hundred, the old administrative district of Middlesex. When Marble Arch was moved to this area in 1851, workers covered the stone over, then dug it up again and propped it against the arch. It was stolen in 1869 and was never seen again.
The village of Tyburn itself had vanished by then, swallowed as London spread west along Oxford Street. Its exact location is still argued over. Some place it near Connaught Place, others closer to Stratford Place, and some point to Elm's Lane in Bayswater. Historians credit the name to "Teo Bourne," an old word for "boundary stream," after the Tyburn Brook that ran through here into the River Westbourne. Some historians trace it instead to "place of the elms," since the Normans used elm trees to mark official execution sites, here and at Smithfield. By the 1700s, people had taken to calling the gallows "God's Tribunal."
A roundel and oak trees now mark the old gallows
Tyburn now sits as a traffic island and stretch of pavement by Marble Arch, with three oak trees planted in 2014 and a roundel marking the old execution site. A circular plaque set into the pavement at the entrance to Edgware Road shows roughly where the Tyburn Tree once stood. A short walk south, Tyburn Convent on Bayswater Road keeps a shrine to the Catholic martyrs who died here, its nuns maintaining a chapel built around relics connected to the executions.
London's own worst stretch of violence did not end with Tyburn's last hanging. The city's executions simply moved two miles east to Newgate, where the crowds, and the crimes that brought people there, carried on much the same.
A traffic island and three young oak trees now mark the ground where London hanged the condemned for almost six hundred years.
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