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Overview
London Cemeteries is a comprehensive guide to all cemeteries within Greater London. Listed alphabetically and with a map to help locate them, each entry includes the address, the date of foundation, the owner, the size, a note on its history, development and current state, and the names, dates and major achievements of any noteworthy people buried there. There are also chapters on the origins of London's cemeteries and cemetery history, planning, architecture and epitaphs.
Illustrated throughout with both modern photographs and a wide range of rarely seen archive images, it is an essential source of information for anyone interested in London's social and architectural history. Alongside a refreshed design, this sixth edition has been extensively revised with updated biographies, additional details about buildings and visitor facilities, fresh research on flora and fauna and entries for 28 further cemeteries in the Greater London area.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780752496900 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The History Press |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 448 |
| File size: | 59 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
HUGH MELLER is a former architectural advisor to the Victorian Society and a curator for the National Trust.
BRIAN PARSONS is the author of The London Way of Death(The History Press) and editor of the Funeral Service Journal. He lives in London.
Read an Excerpt
London Cemeteries
An Illustrated Guide and Gazetteer
By Hugh Meller, Brian Parsons
The History Press
Copyright © 2013 Hugh Meller and Brian ParsonsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7524-9690-0
CHAPTER 1
History
In the history of the cemetery movement, London played a major but often insalubrious role until well after the founding of its first garden cemetery at Kensal Green in 1832. Before that date the means of burial in London was either traditionally in the churchyard or in one of the recently founded private burial grounds and chapels. By the 1830s neither method was proving satisfactory. Some churchyards had been in use since the middle ages (St. Paul's had a continuous history of burial since the Romans), and they were now expected to cope with over 40,000 deaths annually, fuelled by cholera epidemics and a vast increase in the population. The City churchyards were, quite simply, filled to overflowing, a fact which did not escape the attention of many commentators who described their ghastly state in the most resounding Victorian prose.
The Builder was dramatic:
This London, the centre of civilization, this condensation of wisdom and intelligence, this huge wedge and conglomerate of pride, buries – no it does not bury – but stores and piles up 50,000 of its dead to putrefy, to rot, to give out exhalations, to darken the air with vapours, faugh! It is loathsome to think of it; but it is strictly true, 50,000 desecrated corpses are every year stacked in some 150 limited pits of churchyards, burial grounds they are called, and one talks of decent and Christian burial ...
Dickens was sardonic:
Such strange churchyards hide in the City of London; churchyards sometimes so entirely pressed upon by houses, so small, so rank, so silent, so forgotten except by the few people who ever look down into them from their smokey windows. As I stand peeping in through the iron gate and rails, I can peel the rusty metal off, like bark from an old tree. The illegible tombstones are all lopsided, the gravemounds lost their shape in the rains of a hundred years ago, the Lombardy Poplar or Plane-Tree that was once a drysalter's daughter and several common-councilmen, has withered like those worthies, and its departed leaves are dust beneath it. Contagion of slow ruin overhangs the place ...
He could also be horrific, as in Bleak House:
"There!" says Jo, pointing, "over yinder, among them pile of bones, and close to that there kitchin winder! They put him very nigh the top. They was obliged to stamp upon it to git it in. I could unkiver it for you with my broom, if the gate was open. That's why they locks it I s'pose," giving it a shake. "It's always locked. Look at the rat!" cries Jo, excited. "Hi! Look! There he goes! Ho! Into the ground!"
The anonymous author of a poem called 'City Graves' treated the subject with macabre humour:
I saw from out the earth peep forth
The white and glistening bones,
With jagged ends of coffin planks,
That e'en the worm disowns;
And once a smooth round skull rolled on,
Like a football, on the stones.
Others argued scientifically, but no less sensationally. Dr Lyon Playfair reckoned that 2,572,580 cubic feet of gases were emitted annually from London's graveyards – which would explain Dickens' remark that 'rot and mildew and dead citizens formed the uppermost scent' in the City.
George Walker, a surgeon with a strong stomach and a dedication to burial reform, zealously visited about fifty London graveyards and in 1839 published his findings in a book, Gatherings from Grave-Yards,Particularly those of London, with a concise History of the Modes of Interment among different Nations, from the earliest Periods: and a Detail of dangerous and fatal Results produced by the unwise and revolting Custom of inhuming the Dead in the midst of the Living. He described the London malpractices at length: drunken gravediggers, second-hand coffins, illegal exhumation, fatal 'miasmas' and the sort of perils that sometimes attended funerals.
In making a grave a body, partly decomposed, was dug up, and placed on the surface, at the side, slightly covered with earth; a mourner stepped upon it, the loosened skin peeled off, he slipped forward, and had nearly fallen into the grave.
Walker was sternly critical of such appalling incidents which prevailed, more especially in the private burial grounds such as Victoria Park which opened in 1845 and was closed around forty years later.
An indignant history of these dubious enterprises was written by Mrs Basil Holmes in 1896. The overcrowded churchyards in the late eighteenth century prompted 'some adventurers to start cemeteries as private speculations', she wrote. By 1835 she estimated, 'there must have been at least fourteen burial grounds in London carried on by private persons, besides some additional chapels with vaults under them conducted in the same way'. These speculations appear to have been managed by totally unscrupulous entrepreneurs who attracted business by undercutting the church's burial charges. Often the officiants were not ministers of religion at all and Mrs Holmes quotes the case of a shoemaker living near such a chapel who conducted funerals dressed in a surplice. Gravediggers were 'obliged to be half groggy to do it' in burial grounds that in one case measured under an acre but had admitted 14,000 bodies in only twenty years, some buried only 2ft deep. Bodies were burnt and mutilated, quicklime was used to hasten decomposition, gravestones were moved 'to give an impression of emptiness'. Bone stealing was common (they were ground down and sold as manure), coffin lead was also stolen and the timbers broken up for firewood.
No doubt practices as vile, as unwholesome and as irreverent were carried on in many of the churchyards, but the overcrowding of the private grounds is so associated with the idea of a private gloating over private gains that is more repulsive.
– said Mrs Holmes.
The most notorious of these places was Enon Chapel, Clements Lane, a dissenters' chapel opened in 1823, which Walker first described in 1839.
Vast numbers of bodies have been placed here ... soon after interments were made, a peculiarly long narrow black fly was observed to crawl out of many of the coffins; this insect, a product of the putrefaction of the bodies, was observed on the following season to be succeeded by another, which had the appearance of a common bug with wings. The children attending the Sunday School, held in this chapel in which these insects were seen to be crawling and flying, in vast numbers, during the summer months, called them "body bugs".
Between the coffins and the chapel floor there was nothing but the boards, not even tongued and grooved. The 'effluvium' in the chapel became so intolerable that no one attended the services although the interments continued. It was reports such as these that belatedly forced the Government to act.
In fact there had been several previous attempts to provide London with adequate burial grounds. Problems encountered as long ago as the plague in the seventeenth century and the opportunity provided by the Great Fire had stimulated plans for extra-mural cemeteries from John Evelyn and Sir Christopher Wren, neither of them implemented. In the early eighteenth century Sir John Vanburgh pleaded that new churches:
Be free'd from that inhuman custome of being made burial places for the Dead; a custome in which there is something so very barbarous in itself besides the many ill consequences that attend it ... there must therefore be cemitarys provided in the skirts of the Towne ... Handsomely and regularly wall'd in, and planted with Trees.
A few churches like St George's, Bloomsbury were provided with small detached churchyards and, after initial misgivings, they became popular but soon filled to capacity. There was also Bunhill Fields in the City which evolved from a seventeenth-century plague pit into the foremost dissenters' cemetery of the eighteenth century, but this was exceptional.
Meanwhile foreign cities in similar difficulties took the first steps towards providing large cemeteries independent of parish churches. British reformers were able to quote precedents in India, Turkey, Louisiana and especially France. Burial in city churchyards had been forbidden in France since 1804, the same year that the grandest of all European cemeteries was founded at the Père-Lachaise in Paris. Dr John Strang, a pioneering enthusiast for Scottish cemeteries exhorted Glaswegians in his book Necropolis Glasguensis (1831) to imitate the French in the formation of a Scottish Père-Lachaise, and it was in the centres of nonconformity like Scotland and Ulster that British cemeteries came into being.
The Rosary Cemetery in Norwich was licensed for 'burial of all denominations' in 1819, the first in England, followed four years later by the Liverpool Necropolis, a year after the barrister George Carden began his campaign for establishing public cemeteries in The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.
In February 1830 Carden convened a meeting to consider the formation of a London cemetery and the London Cemetery Company was constituted. In January 1832 the first of a series of cholera epidemics hit London, proving once more how necessary it was to provide cemeteries. Many people in fact believed that the evil-smelling city graveyards were in some way responsible for the disease. In July 1832 the company obtained the right by Act of Parliament to open a cemetery at Kensal Green.
It was a success, and very quickly other joint-stock companies were formed to provide a cordon sanitaire of seven private cemeteries around London. £400,000 was invested, 260 acres purchased and 3,336 burials coped with annually, according to Sir Edwin Chadwick, who produced a report for the Poor Law Commissioners, On the Results of a Special Inquiry into the Practice of Interment in Towns in 1843. Chadwick emphasised that cemeteries should not be the exclusive preserve of commercial companies, but that public cemeteries should be founded to cater for the poorer classes. He and others complained that burial in private cemeteries was becoming synonymous with luxury. The cheapest graves in Kensal Green cost thirty shillings and there was the additional expense of travelling there. Brick vaults cost as much as £50 and the huge mausolea could easily exceed £1,000. In contrast, burial at Enon Chapel had been bought for a mere twelve shillings. On another point Chadwick was adamant. Burial in towns should be 'entirely prohibited'.
His advice was heeded by the 1850 Metropolitan Interments Act. It legislated that the Board of Health should have powers to lay out new cemeteries, advise on the closure of old churchyards in which further burials were forbidden and even to purchase compulsorily the private cemeteries. Brompton Cemetery was, in fact, acquired before the Act was repealed by the 1852 Burial Act, which empowered London vestries to form Burial Boards and provide new burial grounds of their own. This Act was the foundation of a spate of new Burial Acts that were only finally rationalised by the 1972 Local Government Act.
In 1850 a scheme for the two national cemeteries was proposed – one at Erith called the Great Eastern Metropolitan Cemetery and the equivalent in the west being an enlarged Kensal Green Cemetery. Although these failed, the proposal for a large burial area, away from the populated area with room for future expansion, was realised in 1854 when the London Necropolis and National Mausoleum Company opened their vast Brookwood Cemetery at Woking. However, with the exception of pauper burials, the cemetery was not the success its directors had hoped for as competition increased from Burial Board cemeteries and also private companies who continued to be active in the second half of the nineteenth century. Chingford Mount (1884), Crystal Palace District (1880), East London (1872), Hendon (1899), Manor Park (1874) and Woodgrange Park (1888) all opened in this period.
One further important development in the history of London's cemeteries was a twentieth-century phenomenon although deeply rooted in the nineteenth century – cremation. There had been advocates of the practice for centuries, including, in the first half of the nineteenth century George Walker and John Loudon. There was support too from the general public according to information in The Builder in 1850.
An association has been formed, at the City of London Mechanics Institution to promote the practice of decomposing the dead by the agency of fire. The members propose to burn, with becoming solemnity, such of their dead as shall have left their remains at the dispersal of the association.
In 1874 Sir Henry Thompson, the Queen's surgeon, sensing the swing of public opinion in its favour, founded the Cremation Society whose supporters included Sir John Millais, Sir John Tenniel, Anthony Trollope, Charles Voysey and Sir Thomas Spencer Wells. The Society intended using land at the Great Northern Cemetery for building Britain's first crematorium, but it was thwarted by the Bishop of Rochester who refused to allow its construction on consecrated ground. In 1878, an acre of land was bought from the London Necropolis Company, whose Brookwood cemetery was nearby but despite building a cremator the following year, due to legal issues the first official cremation was delayed until March 1885.
In the 1890s, Manchester, Glasgow and Liverpool built crematoria and again London was slow in following the example of the provinces. However, by 1900 the increase in the number of cremations at Woking persuaded the Cremation Society to establish a separate London Cremation Company which soon made up for earlier inadequacies. In 1902 the Golders Green Crematorium was opened by Sir Henry Thompson which was to become, in the Company's own words, 'the world's foremost crematorium.' The City of London Crematorium opened within their cemetery at Ilford in 1904 but it was not until 1915 that south London was provided with a facility when the South Metropolitan Cemetery Company opened West Norwood Crematorium.
By 1900 there were approximately eighty-six cemeteries in the London area; thirty years later that had risen to 116. While the joint-stock company had initially led the way only to be competing against burial board cemeteries, private enterprise continued in the twentieth century. Organisations like the Great Southern Cemetery, Crematorium and Land Company established Streatham Park Cemetery in 1909 (and a crematorium in 1936), and the Abney Park Cemetery Company having four cemeteries and a crematorium, rivalled United Cemeteries Ltd for being the largest proprietary cemetery company in the UK.
Meanwhile, burial and cemeteries were increasingly under threat. The opening of five crematoria during the inter-war years was followed by a shift in the preference for cremation with burial being finally overtaken in 1967. Demand at the City of London was at such a level that a new crematorium was built in 1971. There are now twenty-five crematoria in London but the upward trend for cremation appears to have steadied with the rate static at around 71 per cent.
The low point for cemeteries appears to have peaked in the 1970s. Private cemetery companies – particularly those without the revenue from a crematorium – fared the worst. All possible land including the verges of main drives and pathways were used for burials, while spare acres were sold for housing, such as at Great Northern. Some cemeteries were sold to local authorities. One of the first such acquisitions was Hendon Cemetery and Crematorium in 1965 by the London Borough of Barnet. Lambeth purchased the South Metropolitan Cemetery at West Norwood the following year, while Nunhead went to Southwark, Chingford Mount to Waltham Forest, Abney Park to Hackney and Tower Hamlets to the Great London Council (now the London Borough of Tower Hamlets). But for local authorities, cemeteries – whether their own or those acquired – were not a high priority and many suffered from a lack of recognition and capital. In many cases maintenance was minimal and cemeteries started to face two threats.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from London Cemeteries by Hugh Meller, Brian Parsons. Copyright © 2013 Hugh Meller and Brian Parsons. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
The Cemeteries,Map of the Cemeteries,
Illustrations,
Authors' Note,
Introduction,
1 History,
2 Planning,
3 Monuments and Buildings,
4 Epitaphs,
5 Flora and Fauna,
Gazetteer,
Notes,
Bibliography,