Blackheath, London

Blackheath is a district of south-east London, England, within the Royal Borough of Greenwich and the London Borough of Lewisham. It is located east of the town of Lewisham, and south of the town of Greenwich.HistoryThe name is recorded in 1166 as Blachehedfeld and means the "dark coloured heathland". It is formed from the Old English 'blæc' and 'hǣth' and refers to the open space that was the meeting place of the ancient hundred of Blackheath. The name was later applied to the Victorian suburb that developed in the 19th century and was extended to the areas known as Blackheath Park and Blackheath Vale.An urban myth is that Blackheath was associated with the 1665 Plague or the Black Death of the mid-14th century. The idea that Blackheath got its name from its use as a burial pit goes all the way back to the medieval period, when it was almost certainly used for the disposal of the dead during the ‘Black Death‘. Virtually every part of London has a local tradition about plague pits under, say, a local school or shop. Certainly they were very common. The sheer number of bodies meant that the traditional churchyards became, as one contemporary put it, ‘overstuft’ very quickly.During the seventeenth century Blackheath was, along with Hounslow Heath, a common assembly point for English Armies. In 1673 the Blackheath Army was assembled under Marshal Schomberg to serve in the Third Anglo-Dutch War.