In 2001, the House of Commons Environment, Transport and Regional Affairs Committee published its findings following an inquiry into UK cemeteries.  One of their key recommendations was: ‘if the public are to continue to have access to affordable, accessible burial in cemeteries fit for the needs of the bereaved, there appears to be no alternative to grave re-use’. Cemeteries were first established during the Victorian period to tackle problems of poor sanitation and lack of churchyard space in cities.  […]

One does not have to look far nowadays to find evidence in the modern media of cemeteries making the news (see BBC 2003; 2005; 2006). Be it grave desecration, memorial regulation or safety in the local cemetery, they are sites that can frequently garner press attention, usually not for the most favourable of reasons. However, this attention does not equate to a general rise in the profile of cemeteries across the country which, this paper suggests, […]

During the course of my ethnographic fieldwork West Norwood Cemetery, one of the ‘Magnificent Seven’ Victorian cemeteries in London, became one of the focus points of my research. One of the main questions encountered throughout my work is how contemporary practices within the material and social dimension of the cemetery shape its future, with a particular emphasis on Victorian cemeteries as contested landscapes, contemporary heritage practices and material culture. This paper will explore these three themes from an anthropological perspective using an in-depth case-study of West Norwood Cemetery in order to provide ethnographic context. […]

Within the last decade there has been a revival in museum and heritage studies, reflecting the growth of their cultural and economic role in contemporary Western society. Whilst there have been some efforts to explore how cemeteries could benefit from this revival, to date cemeteries have not been widely included or recognised as ‘heritage’ spaces in either policy or research. This paper addresses this disparity and makes tentative links between cemeteries and museums in their wider social, […]

In 1899 the manager of a privately-owned cemetery appeared in court in Aberdeen. He had ensured sufficient burial space by exhuming and relocating coffins without authority or permission. The manager was imprisoned for six months and the city of Aberdeen made aware of the conditions in which the poor of the city were buried. The cremationist Dr Robert Farquharson, MP for East Aberdeen, used the occasion to press for a crematorium, cremation having been legalised in the UK in 1884. […]

From Lewis Mumford’s influential model of urban civilisation terminating in ‘the final cemetery, the Necropolis’ to Iain Sinclair’s vision of contemporary London as a ‘necropolis culture’, twentieth-century commentators have repeatedly defined the modern metropolis as a city of the dead. The dominance of necropolitan discourse in London literature has had a significant impact on representations of the city’s cemeteries, ahistorically subordinating the particular local, historical, ideological and affective characteristics of individual cemeteries to a transcendent vision of cemetery as city of the dead – in the terms of James Thomson’s 1874 poem, […]

This paper presents some preliminary findings of a study of headstones and burial records from the Unitarian chapel at Stannington, some five kilometres north-west of Sheffield. The mismatch between individuals named on tombstones and individuals listed in burial records suggests that it may be useful to conceive of each burial plot as having its own individual “life history”, in the same way that archaeologists have talked of the life cycle of individual artefacts or structures. A number of ideas will be explored in relation to this model, […]

The natural burial movement established a new burial aesthetic in which the identity and location of the deceased is potentially known only to the burial ground manager and the family and friends of the deceased.  In the most common form of natural burial the grave is marked by the planting of a tree. There has been very little research on why people choose natural burial either for themselves or their loved ones.  There is also little known about the significance of the memorial tree to the deceased or the family and friends of the deceased.  […]

Visitors to cemeteries and churchyards exhibit a wide array of value systems, harbouring perceptions that range from sacred and sombre to scary or seductive. These values impact on behaviour and mean that cemeteries perform social roles varying in scope from a site of mourning to gang territory. The multiple roles, however, are not always complementary. This research examines real and potential conflict, resolution and the influence this has on the cemetery environment. In this paper we take two journeys in pursuit of deeper understanding of the social diversity in cemeteries. […]

The Berlin cemetery scene is marked by a complex cultural heritage administered in a decentralised manner. One hundred and ninety-one cemeteries are used for burials: the municipal Senate Administration runs 69, and 115 are owned by Protestant and Catholic parishes. There are also Jewish, Russian-Orthodox and Muslim burial grounds as well as a British cemetery. All the burial sites together amount to an area of 1,5 % of the whole metropolitan area. The Berlin Senate Administration estimated that about half of the city’s cemetery area is not required. […]

A funeral is not just the main event at church, crematorium or cemetery on the day; everything that precedes and follows that event is part of the funeral process. There is often another ceremony – freer in form and content, often smaller and more intimate – for the burial/scattering of ashes, planting of memorial trees, placing of memorial benches, erection of headstones, etc., after the first funeral. Here, families can take a greater role in saying goodbye to their loved one, […]

Processes implicated in globalisation are focusing attention on identities in a world where traditional ideas of people as members of fixed, distinct societies and cultures no longer hold. For some incoming and settled groups the cemetery can be a liminal space engendering cosmopolitan engagement, through evocation of place of origin whilst reflecting the genesis of a new situational identity. Geography and chronology are reshaped and history becomes spatial in cemeteries where burial has overtaken the repatriation option after a death. […]

The Glasgow Necropolis, the first garden or ornamental cemetery in Scotland, opened in spring 1833 on what had been a private park, on a hill opposite the city’s medieval cathedral. The cemetery was developed by the Merchants’ House, one of the two burgess institutions in the city, as both a civic amenity and a way of turning an unproductive asset into a profitable concern. The Necropolis soon became a significant cultural enterprise, attracting the custom of the emerging middle classes and the attention of visitors to the city. […]

Here I want to look at funeral art as it may be seen in Portuguese public cemeteries designed in the 19th century, with some attention to the changes in outlook and urban planning that occurred in the late 18th. It was these changes that converted the cemetery into a new symbolic structure within the urban space. The cemetery we know today arose from the hygienic precepts of that earlier time. In Portugal the emergence of public cemeteries entailed complications and indeed social conflict, […]

Most cemeteries are historic. While only a tiny percentage of cemeteries are included on national lists of historic parks and gardens, the majority, being laid out before 1914, are historic in at least a local or regional context.  Furthermore, while no one knows the numbers, it is likely that listing of built structures under-represents the historic interest of cemetery structures as a type. But if we want to avoid heritage and its connotations, cemeteries are special places, […]

This is a case study of evolving burial policies in two Newfoundland communities, where the most where the most contentious current issue relates to the burial of bodies during the winter season. Cemetery associations argue that it is too expensive to clear the snow and dig through the frozen ground, all the while avoiding damage to other monuments.  On the other hand, some community members argue that they should have the right to winter burials, to assist with closure (instead of having to wait for a burial in the spring, […]

Arguably death is no longer the ‘taboo’ that is was once infamously described as by Ariès, evidenced by the wealth of information available now on death and dying. In many ways this growth in a Sociology of Death is as a result of the development of the palliative care movement. This paper proposes that within a Sociology of Death the dying process and bereavement care have dominated discussion, and that the disposal of the body and memorialisation are the marginalised (the taboo) topics of today. […]

The funerary art depicts the social conditions, as well as, the influences of current architectural and sculptural trends. Local tradition can be traced also in the aesthetics of this art. The case of cemeteries in Greece, over the 19th century, mainly the First Cemetery of Athens and the Cemetery of Syros reflects all these aspects. It is worth noticing that particularly the cemetery of Athens is associated with the rebirth of the New Greek State after four centuries of cultural silence. […]

My paper deals with Lutheran funerary sculpture in Finland and the modernist rejection of the 19th century cemetery culture. The emotional weight of the elaborate 19th cemetery culture was given tension by the dichotomies of time and timelessness, presence and absence, sorrow and comfort. Memorials with the popular theme of mourning represented absence sharpened by feelings of sorrow and loss that structured the modern experience of the world. The cemetery was seen as an ideal place for reflection on death, […]