This paper is concerned with identifying if there are distinctions between natural burial sites and other more familiar, ‘traditional’ burial places using the case study woodland burial ground of my doctoral research. This particular site is consecrated and affiliated to the Church of England. The provider’s aim is to establish a deciduous native woodland, hence why the site is referred to as a ‘woodland’ burial ground. On the one hand the legal aspects of this provision make the site similar to a churchyard, […]

Theoretical debate on cemeteries generally relates to one of two discourses: that cemeteries demonstrated the hold of middle-class ideals on the construction of urban environments, where even in the realms of death the expression of status and class were a central concern; and that the cemetery was essentially a modern phenomenon that displaced and marginalized the dead, so reflecting a profound societal unease with evidence of mortality. These models position the cemetery very firmly in the context of the nineteenth-century city, […]

Cemeteries are frequently sites of contestation. Grave owners and cemetery managers; clergy and the public; interest groups and mourners; ‘romantics/conservationists’ and ‘tidiers’; new and traditional user groups – to cite a few of the groups that can sometimes find themselves in opposition. The living and the dead rarely seem to be pitched in battle, though ‘ the liminal power of the mourner’ (Turner, 1969) sometimes seems to invoke the dead to render the living more powerful or dominant in contest. […]

This paper presents ongoing PhD research examining the legal framework, rules and regulations of the Church of England relating to disposal of the dead with some comparison with state regulation. The paper reviews the roles of the PCC and incumbent as regulators and policy makers in the churchyard. A key point in the research is establishing the functional public authority status of the PCC for s6(3)(b) and 6(5) Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA) (contra to finding of House of Lords in Wallbank litigation) by reference to the on-going case law usually linked to social housing and care homes for the elderly, […]

This paper offers a case study of burial and commemoration at York Cemetery from 1837 to 1901. The cultural significance of cemeteries is embodied by their design as a specific form of burial landscape and by their use as an arena to express social relationships as signified by the selection of a burial plot, funeral service, memorial and inscription and by visits to the gravesite. York Cemetery’s own unique history was embedded within the nationwide – indeed international – movement to establish modern cemeteries. […]