CEMETERIES

In the early 19^thC it came to be appreciated that in the years to come London's existing graveyards would have trouble accommodating the increased number of corpses that would be derived from the city's growing population. Therefore, over the years 1832-41 a number of business groups commissioned Acts of Parliament to enable them to establish commercial cemeteries.¹

¹. The Magnificent Seven cemeteries that were established during the decade were: Abney Park (1840) in Stoke Newington, Brompton Cemetery (1840), Highgate Cemetery (1839), Kensal Green Cemetery (1832), Nunhead Cemetery (1840), Tower Hamlets Cemetery (1841), and West Norwood Cemetery (1837).

Abney Park Cemetery

It has been claimed that Abney Park was planted so that there was a series of trees in which every tree had a Latin name that began with a successive name of the alphabet

Location: 215 Stoke Newington High Street, N16 0LH

Website: https://abneypark.org

Brompton Cemetery

The architect Stephen Geary was the leading figure in the West London & Westminster Cemetery Company that secured the Act in 1837 under which Brompton Cemetery was created. In 1838 the Holland House estate sold to the enterprise a 16.5 ha. parcel of land that had been used for market gardening. The following year Mr Geary was ousted from the business by his fellow directors. In his place, Benjamin Baud was appointed to lay out the cemetery's grounds.

In 1850 the General Board of Health, acting largely at the direction of Edwin Chadwick, issued a report that castigated the metropolitan cemetery companies. The following year the Treasury agreed to underwrite the Board's wish that London's commercial cemeteries should be taken into state ownership. The Metropolitan Interments Act of 1850 provided a statutory basis for the transfer. The directors of the Brompton agreed to sell their cemetery. However, within the government there had been growing concern at the Board of Health's growing ambitions. It was decided not to allow it such scope for action. By the time that this change of policy became prevalent, the Brompton had already been nationalised. It has remained in public ownership ever since.

In 2009 it was still possible to be buried in the Cemetery.

Location: Fulham Road, SW10 9UG (blue, yellow)

Website: www.royalparks.org.uk/parks/brompton-cemetery

Bunhill Fields Burial Grounds

The name Bunhill Fields is a corruption of Bonehill Fields. In 1549 bones from the charnel house at St Paul's Cathedral were deposited there. During the Great Plague of 1665 it was used as a burial site because it was not consecrated the corpses of Protestant Nonconformists were buried there without the use of The Book of Common Prayer. In 1695 they started to use it on a large-scale. Among those whose remains were interred there were John Bunyan (d.1688), Daniel Defoe (d.1731), Thomas Bayes (d.1761), and William Blake (d.1827). The spiked gate in the Fields's north-eastern corner was intended to deter body snatchers. The final burial in Bunhill Fields took place in 1854. Under an 1867 Act of Parliament, the City Corporation bound itself to maintain the cemetery as a public place.

Location: Bunhill Row, EC1Y 2BG (purple, yellow)

Website: www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/things-to-do/city-gardens/find-a-garden/bunhill-fields-burial-ground

The Cemetery That Was n't

In the 1830s Thomas Willson designed a pyramid for Primrose Hill. The structure's purpose was to allow 5 million corpses to be interred in it.

See Also: ARCHITECTURE Unbuilt London

The Crossbones Burial Ground

In the late 1990s London Underground was carrying out excavations in Southwark as part of its construction of its extension of the Jubilee Line. The workers uncovered unanticipated human remains. These had been buried in the Crossbones Burial Ground, a graveyard that had been closed for burial in 1853. The open space survived because a law had been passed, at the behest of Mrs Basil Holmes, that had made it illegal for houses to be built over burial grounds.

Following the rediscovery, a range of people who included locals, sex workers, and pagans assumed an interest in the site. As a mark of respect for the memory of those social outcasts who had been buried there, they sought to prevent any redevelopment of the site.

Location: Redcross Way, Southwark, SE1 1TA. The street leads to Union Street. Brick walls surround an open space that is about the size of five tennis courts.

Website: http://crossbones.org.uk (The Friends of Cross Bones)

Dogs Cemeteries

Queen Victoria gave the Battersea Dogs Home her support.

See Also: DOGS

Hyde Park Secret Pet Cemetery

1880-1915 Dogs Cemetery.

Location: Hyde Park, W2 2UH (purple, orange)

Website: www.royalparks.org.uk/whats-on/upcoming-events/the-secret-pet-cemetery-of-hyde-park

Highgate Cemetery

Highgate Cemetery (1839) straddles Swains Lane. The western section is the older and architecturally more interesting portion. The Cemetery was developed on what had been the orchard of Ashurst Manor. It was lain out by the entrepreneur Stephen Geary and the landscape gardener David Ramsey. The catacombs were designed by James Bunstone Bunning. The Dissenters chapel was smaller than the Anglican one.

In 1956 the corpses Karl Marx (d.1883) and his family were exhumed and reburied a hundred yards away from their original resting place under a memorial that had been sculpted by Lawrence Bradshaw and paid for by the Communist Party of Great Britain. The renowned Victorian social sciences writer Herbert Spencer is buried nearby. The area is referred to as Marx & Spencer.

As the Cemetery became more run down so Ramsey's flowerbeds and lawns disappeared beneath woodland. In 1975 the business that owned Highgate Cemetery collapsed. Six years later the Friends of Highgate Cemetery acquired the freehold of the site.

Location: Swains Lane, N6 6PJ.

Website: https://highgatecemetery.org

The Friends of Highgate Cemetery

The Friends of Highgate Cemetery was founded by Jean Pateman (n e Ouseley-Smith) (1921-2012).

By 1981 the Friends had acquired the freeholds of both cemeteries.

In 2012 there were approximately 170,000 corpses buried in 53,000 graves.

Website: https://highgatecemetery.org/about/the-friends

Name Dropping

Henry Crabb Robinson spent his working life first as a solicitor and then as a barrister. Throughout his adult life he was a hunter of literary lions. In 1828, having acquired enough capital to furnish himself with an annual gentlemanly income of 500 p.a., he retired from the law and devoted himself to cultural pursuits. He took to hosting breakfast parties to which he would invite a m l e of guests. As a result, his gravestone in Highgate Cemetery was largely taken up with a list of his friends and associates who had been more famous than he had been.

Location: 30 Russell Square, WC1B 5DT (purple, turquoise)

See Also: WILLIAM BLAKE; LITERATURE

The Vampire

In late 1969 David Farrant (1946-2019), a local resident who had an interest in the occult, wrote a letter to The Ham & High newspaper that drew the publications notice to what he claimed to have seen in the Western Section. This involved a tall, strange figure that he believed to have been supernatural. The following week the paper published letters from several people describing a variety of ghosts. Sean Manchester asserted it was a vampire that had been woken from the dead by occultists (he was to claim that the journalist had inflated what he had said). Farrant and Manchester started trying to outdo one another in their claims. The Today television programme did a live broadcast on Friday 13 March 1970. On it, Manchester announced that that night there was going to be a mass vampire hunt in the cemetery. A couple of hundred people gathered outside it. Some of them scaled the walls. Graves were broken into.

Farrant and Manchester continued to snipe at one another until the former's death in 2019.

See Also: HORROR FICTION Vampires

Website: www.davidfarrant.org

Kensal Green Cemetery

Kensal Green Cemetery (1833) was the first of the Magnificent Seven to be built. Its creation was prompted in part by the opening of the P re Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

Kensal Green Cemetery has a set of iron bar gates that give access to the north side of the canal. They are located opposite the western side of the gasholders that are located to the south of the canal. They allowed access for funeral parties that came by water.

Once Kensal was full many people who would have been buried there were instead interred at Clamp Hill near Harrow.

Location: Harrow Road, W10 4RA.

Website: www.kensalgreencemetery.com

John Claudius Loudoun

John Claudius Loudoun was a leading advocate of cemeteries that were reached by railway.

Location: 3 Porchester Terrace, W2 3TH (orange, red)

Municipal Cemeteries

Islington & St Pancras Cemetery was the first municipal cemetery in London. The 190-acre site was developed on what had been Horseshoe Farm, Finchley.

Location: 278 High Road, East Finchley, N2 9AG

Website: https://iccslondon.co.uk/the-sites/islington-and-st-pancras-cemetery

National Federation of Cemetery Friends

Location: North Lodge East Wing, Brompton Cemetery, Old Brompton Road, SW5 9JE

Website: www.cemeteryfriends.com

Nunhead Cemetery

Maurice Riordan's poem The January Birds was informed by a visit made to Nunhead Cemetery.

Location: Linden Grove, SE15 3LP

Website: www.fonc.org.uk

Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park

Gravestones in Tower Hamlets Cemetery in Bow provided the names for character in the B.B.C. Television soap EastEnders, which started airing in 1985.

Location: Southern Grove, E3 4PX

Website: https://fothcp.org www.towerhamlets.gov.uk/lgnl/leisure_and_culture/parks_and_open_spaces/cemetery_park.aspx

West Norwood Cemetery

Sir William Tite designed West Norwood Cemetery in the Revival Gothic style. It became known as the millionaire's cemetery because of the inventors and business who were buried there.

In 1838 the Greek Orthodox portion of the cemetery was opened in 1838.

Location: Norwood Road, SE27 9JU

Website www.fownc

David Backhouse 2024