When Sir Christopher Wren mapped Whitechapel in 1673, he labelled the rising ground as the mud wall called the Fort. In 1643, with King Charles I's armies threatening to sack London, the city had hastily thrown up a ring of twenty-three or twenty-four earthen forts and connecting trenches. Volunteers - men too old for the regular militia, women, and children - dug eighteen miles of earthworks in a few weeks. A visiting Scotsman walked the full ring in twelve hours. Fort No. 2 commanded the Whitechapel Road: a nine-angled work, palisaded and ditched, mounted with seven brass cannon. After peace returned, the city flattened most of the forts because they ruined good farmland. Whitechapel Mount kept its scale. By 1811 the antiquarian Daniel Lysons measured it: three hundred and twenty-nine feet long, a hundred and eighty-two feet broad, and more than twenty-five feet above ground level.

In 1665, the bubonic plague killed somewhere between seventy and a hundred thousand Londoners. Aldgate, Whitechapel, and Stepney were hit hard, and the official mass graves filled faster than the gravediggers could keep up. The men driving the dead carts were, in the words of one contemporary observer, very idle base liveing men and very rude, swearing and cursing at their work. There were burial grounds across the road from the Mount, and rumour insisted the mound itself held thousands of bodies. The Great Fire of London the following year added a parallel story - that fire rubble had been dumped on top of the plague pit to cover it up. When the authorities prepared to remove the Mount in the 1800s, they pierced its sides specifically to refute the corpse story. They found no remains. Or said they did not. A hospital history meanwhile records that by 1764 the Mount Burying Ground was full - so something was buried in there.

The most likely explanation is also the least romantic. In 1671 Parliament designated seven official laystalls - sanctioned rubbish tips - for the City of London, and Whitechapel Mount was one. All the household rubbish from Portsoken, Tower, Duke's Place, and Lime Street wards came here. But a laystall was a business, not a pile. The proprietor employed gangs of men, women, and boys to sort the rubbish and recycle whatever could be sold. Most domestic waste by volume was coal ash - the dust in dustman - and ash made superb bricks. As Georgian London exploded in size, the city's brickfields could not keep up with demand. The Mount became a brick mine. An Old Bailey case from 1809 records bricks being delivered from the diminishing dunghill. Hanbury's Brewhouse - now the Black Eagle Brewery on Brick Lane - rose partly from Whitechapel's accumulated household waste.

Because Londoners believed the Great Fire theory, the dismantling of the Mount in 1807 and 1808 attracted treasure hunters. Cockney enthusiasts sifted the soil for relics of pre-Fire London. They found - or claimed to find - a silver tankard and a Roman coin. The most spectacular alleged discovery was a carved boar's head with silver tusks, identified by reputable antiquarians as a survival from the Boar's Head Inn at Eastcheap. The inn had appeared in Shakespeare as the haunt of Falstaff and Mistress Quickly, and had indeed burned in 1666. Whether the tusks were genuine no one can now say, but the story tells us something about the Mount: it functioned as London's collective memory hole, where everything dramatic that had happened to the city in the seventeenth century was assumed to have ended up.

Today the Mount survives as a street name. Walk south from the Whitechapel Road and you reach Mount Terrace, E1 - a row of bricks that may literally have been made from the hill they now name. The Royal London Hospital occupies most of the former site. Redevelopment has occasionally allowed archaeologists a glimpse beneath, but there has never been a systematic dig. A play called The Skeleton Witness, or The Murder at the Mound, used the place as a setting for a Gothic plot about a murder concealed in the soil. The phrase Whitechapel dunghill became a Cockney idiom for the far eastern edge of London. The Mount stood at the doorway of the East End for at least 160 years and probably much longer, and almost nobody now remembers it was there.