Cholera first appeared in Britain in 1831, originating from India, where it had spread across Europe during a time of increasing global mobility. Subsequent outbreaks of cholera occurred throughout the nineteenth century, most notably in 1848-49. The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-20 marked a culmination of a century of infectious disease and subsequent burial reform. These diseases not only claimed countless lives, but they also overwhelmed local authorities and an infant and overstretched burial industry. Somewhat out of necessity, […]

The paper attempts a socio-political study of coffin-less burial practices adopted by two Catholic churches in the district of Alappuzha, Kerala. The paper argues that the practice reterritorializes and deterritorializes the contemporary churchyard scene while also examining its scope of expansion as a sustainable practice. The Kerala Catholic Church has traditionally relied on coffin burials, where coffins of varying quality and wood were used, typically as an indicator of social status. However, the increasing plastic content in the materials has hampered the decaying process of the body, […]

This presentation reflects on a three-year collaboration (2023–25) between the Metropolitan Cemetery Board and the School of Design at Rockingham Regional Memorial Park. Here, Master of Landscape Architecture students developed innovative masterplans addressing contemporary challenges of cemetery design, memory, and memorialisation through research, fieldwork, mapping, and design exploration. Harkening back to the elemental origins of Landscape Architecture as a discipline, students engaged with landform as well as the intersection between future ecology and existential inquiry, to create personalised designs underpinned by creativity and scholarly rigor. […]

To what extent was cremation practised among the Bradford Reform Jewish community? What role did social class and migrant status play in shaping Jewish cremation rates? How did the practice of cremation among the Bradford Reform Jewry and Berlin’s Jewish communities shape the topography of their cemeteries? Previous studies of the rise of cremation among Jewish and non-Jewish Germans have overlooked the German Jewry in the diaspora. Therefore, this paper provides new insight into the ongoing dialogue between migrants and their country of origin by conducting a transnational study of cremation. […]

The functions and tasks of cemeteries, especially urban cemeteries, have changed fundamentally in recent decades. In addition to the former almost exclusive functions of burial, memorialisation and cultural history, functions linked to the relatively large green areas of urban park cemeteries have been developed, and city dwellers have started to use cemeteries in a similar way to parks (see recreational and tourist use), which has also had an impact on the operation of cemeteries. In our previous research, […]

The functions of cemeteries have been altered over the past decades. Urban growth, climate change and covid have fundamentally changed the way we think about cemeteries. In our previous research, we found that the primary function of cemeteries (burial place, memorial site) has not changed, but the secondary (green infrastructure, climate protection, cultural heritage protection) and tertiary functions (education, tourism, recreation, community service) have emerged. Multifunctional use and the enhancement of these functions require that cemeteries collect data related to each of these fields, […]

Europe has been the arena for various armed conflicts over the centuries, including two called world wars. As a consequence of these armed conflicts, it was and is also the place where we are confronted with the location of many war cemeteries and individual and mass graves. These places are the burial grounds for the country’s citizens on whose territory they are located, the citizens of allied countries, and the citizens of those countries with which the armed conflict took place. […]

Belief in ghosts is often thought of as a relic of the past—an outmoded belief linked to the traditional cultures of rural China.  But ghost stories are commonplace in Hong Kong and other large Chinese cities and evidence of the fear of ghosts can be found in the ways that modern urban people treat death, funeral homes, and cemeteries. This talk analyses belief in ghosts as a facet of modern, urban living. I suggest that traditional Chinese beliefs about ghosts have transformed rather than diminished as China has urbanized, […]

The origins, rediscovery, and preservation of the African Burial Ground in lower Manhattan represents a multi-layered view of the experience of people of African descent in the area, from enslaved and free black people in the colonial era to late 20th and early 21st century African Americans who became involved and invested in the discovery, protection, and preservation of this important site. Lower Manhattan in New York City is a palimpsest of the history of European conquest, […]

I examine trends in the commemoration of older adults over the age of 70 by analysing monumental commemoration rates in Cambridgeshire cemeteries from the period 1845-1925. With full access to a database of nearly 80,000 graves, an initial observation showed a lower rate of commemoration for the elderly compared to younger adults. Through historical documentation and basic summary statistics in SPSS, I investigate three hypotheses to attempt to explain these differential commemoration rates: a lack of psychological attachment to the elderly, […]

This communication delves into the process of identifying individuals who perished in disasters in Cameroon, focusing on two specific events: the Nsam fire on February 14, 1998, in Yaoundé, resulting in the loss of over 300 lives, and the Eséka train derailment on October 21, 2016, causing the death of more than 80 people. The study explores the various stages of recognizing the deceased and victims of the Nsam disaster, initially accused of being thieves before gaining national recognition marked by the declaration of a national day of mourning. […]

Since colonisation, Australia’s distance from perceived centres of European culture has been a defining feature of its local, national and international identity. Blainey comprehensively challenged the impact of Australia’s liminal position in the 1960s, and this misconception is still being readdressed. Studies demonstrate substantial cultural and material exchanges between Europe and colonial Australia. One understudied exchange is the transference of burial preferences, funeral customs, and funeral markers. Consequently, this paper draws on an ongoing project to present a brief history of the material and cultural exchange of memorial designs and structures between Britain and Australia during the Victorian period. […]

Inexorable growth has dramatically transformed the city-state of Singapore. From a modest colonial entrepot in the 1950s with a population of barely one million, despite its land scarcity, Singapore has expanded to embrace over 6 million residents today with a GDP per capita of over $80,000, one of the highest in the world. In that remarkable process, however, Singapore has lost over 90% of its cemeteries and graveyards, and with them, a large part of the natural resources that enveloped them, […]

This study examines the regulatory frameworks and landscape designs of burial grounds in contemporary Lithuania, focusing particularly on the legal documents and municipal regulations governing cemetery maintenance and development. While the majority of regulations target users of the graveyards, designers and administrators are afforded considerable latitude due to the absence of precise guidelines. This flexibility allows for diverse approaches to shaping burial landscapes across municipalities. Although the arbitrary planting of trees, bushes, and shrubs is permitted only upon request, […]

It is well-established that the majority of the dead were not commemorated, as supported by studies including the University of Leicester Graveyards Group (2012). The use of funerary monuments to mark graves and commemorate the dead gradually increased across the 18th and 19th centuries – but some of the deceased were better remembered than others. This paper posits we re-examine funerary monuments with a more critical eye and examine the inequalities present in their prose (or lack thereof). […]

The Norwegian Cremation Society celebrated the legalization of cremation as a facultative practice in Norway in 1898. This milestone was followed by an architectural competition in 1906, commissioned by the Society to find a suitable design for the country’s first purpose-built crematorium. Leaning on experiences from its international peers, the Society recognized the need for a balanced architectural expression that merged the vague concepts of appropriateness, modernity and tradition. This was essential in order to have the crematorium gain agency on its own and garner support for a changed view on death and funerals. […]

Following the Highgate Cemetery Act 2022, the Friends of Highgate Cemetery Trust is able to extinguish rights of burial and to disturb human remains in Highgate Cemetery for the purpose of increasing the space for interments and for the conservation of the Cemetery. The Trust may also use appropriately or remove altogether from the Cemetery memorials on such graves. Clearly Parliament recognised that change was necessary to ensure the sustainable future of the Cemetery, but in England the re-use of graves is not yet widely practised, […]

In September 1878, William Holland, the only remaining original member of the Holly Springs, Mississippi Yellow Fever Relief Committee, described the presence of the plague in his small town as, ‘living in the midst of the very garden of death’. According to available sources, this epidemic, which relentlessly swept across the state, claimed over four thousand citizens in five months, with the total number of cases exceeding sixteen thousand individuals. Although the pestilence was well-known in the region, […]

When Barthelemy Dagnan bought three plants of the Helichrysum Orientale (= immortelle) in 1815 at the market of Marseille (France) and planted them in his garden, he could not have guessed that in doing so he gave a new twist to the funeral and commemorative culture of the 19th century. The Helichrysum became the commemorative flower of 19th-century Europe and far beyond. As the natural flower disappeared from the economic scene, it remained in memory, well into the 20th century, […]

The Church of England have embarked on the largest systematic churchyard mapping project ever attempted. The CofE are working with surveying company AG Intl to produce digital maps of all their churchyards (approximately 17,5000 sites) showing the location of churchyard features, all extant monuments, and incorporating data from births, marriages and deaths registers. When completed these maps will be freely available online through the Church Heritage Record and open a wealth of new research avenues. Caring for God’s Acre have funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund and Historic England to run a programme of public engagement alongside the mapping, […]