As I said in the previous shot, I believe that all of the remains have been removed from the crypt now that it has become a café. However some of the headstones and monuments remain down here through a passageway just off to the side of the café. Some of them are not that ancient in the overall scheme of things, such as the monument of Henry Croft. He is described as "The Original Pearly King", who had the misfortune to die on New Year's Day of 1930, aged 68.

When I saw this, I had assumed that he was a manufacturer of buttons or something similar, but that is not the case. He was in fact a street sweeper who started work at age 15 and continued for around 50 years into the 1920s. At some point he decided to start attaching mother of pearl buttons to his clothes, and started raising funds for local hospitals dressed in his pearly suits.

He inspired some others to do this as well and these people became known as Pearly Kings and Pearly Queens. For his charitable work he was presented to King Edward VII in 1907. Upon his death (which occurred in the same workhouse where he had been born and later raised as an orphan), his funeral cortege stretched for over half a mile. Here is the kicker, though; he was not in fact buried here. The statue was commissioned in 1931 and erected at his burial site in 1934. It was vandalised several times (proving that a-holes aren't a purely modern invention) and was moved to the crypt in 2002.

On the up side, it's now well protected, and will therefore endure for quite a while. It's doubtful that an orphaned London street sweeper from the late 1800s would have imagined that his story would still be told on a global communications network - and told from the other side of the world - the better part of a century after his death.

Most of the other headstones that we can see date from the 1800s.