Matthew Flinders’ lead coffin plate makes voyage from underground London to South Australia
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Explorer was buried in home town after his remains were found during construction of UK’s high speed rail. The small sheet of lead, which once adorned a coffin that was lost under London for 200 years, now sits in a slick new building in the Adelaide CBD.
![[Matthew Flinders’ coffin plate after being unearthed at the HS2 construction site.]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/c4bc27b6a8d79a7da21adcdf817375865e12e214/0_0_4460_6104/master/4460.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
“Capt. Matthew Flinders RN, died 19 July 1814, aged 40 years,” it says, the ornate writing legible despite signs of age. Flinders is credited with naming Australia, and was the first European to circumnavigate the vast continent. Sign up for Guardian Australia’s breaking news email.
![[The coffin plate is removed after being discovered at the archaeological dig underneath London's Euston train station.]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/6bd5cf604845445ca7bf765294ba9fbfd3e003f4/0_0_5458_3400/master/5458.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
When he arrived home from his travels in 1810 after a series of adventures (including years in detention in Mauritius) he was ill with kidney disease. He died at about the same time his book, A Voyage to Terra Australis, was published, and was buried in St James’s burial ground near Euston station. But his headstone was removed, and the location of his remains forgotten – although urban myths abounded that he was under platform 12 or 15.
In 2019 during the construction of the HS2 – a high-speed rail network in the UK – tens of thousands of bodies were exhumed from the old burial ground. HS2’s head of heritage, Helen Wass, said archaeologists worked out roughly where Flinders was located.
“Ultimately, during the careful excavation of the burial ground, [they found] his coffin plate, and because it was lead, it was preserved in the ground,” she says. “We have a lot of tin plate, and that just rots away if it gets wet. So we were really fortunate.
