We cannot overlook the primary function of our cemeteries, giving our dead their final resting place. However, the past few years, a lot of contemporary secondary and tertiary functions and uses have been developed on cemeteries in many European cities and municipalities. Local residents have discovered the secondary uses of cemeteries as places to find peace and quiet within their living environments, tourists and educational groups have discovered the historic cemeteries as places to discover the history of death and dying (tertiary). […]

This is a study of deathscapes at the margins of Europe, Denmark and Cyprus, focusing on cemeteries in their respective capitals. By employing comparison and situating the emergence of cemeteries within the two societies’ different socio-historical trajectories, we challenge key assumptions on cemeteries put forth by historians and sociologists related to cemeteries’ inexorable secularisation and the democratic prerogative of everyone, not just the elites, to their posthumous presence as named individuals. Specifically, we show how in Denmark’s case the predominance of social democracy entailed a preference for erasure in communal, […]

As part of a larger project researching Liverpool’s nineteenth-century cemeteries, investigations into the archives held by Liverpool City Council regarding Toxteth Park Cemetery (established in 1856) led to the discovery of some significant documents. Alongside historic plans of the cemetery, a large collection of monument illustrations was uncovered, drawn in the nineteenth-century by the cemetery’s resident masons, George Muir and Andrew Laidlaw. Over 240 illustrated papers were found, hitherto forgotten for over a century. Exploring these, […]

The post of cemetery chaplain emerged in parallel with the creation of the first wave of nineteenth century proprietary cemeteries. Appointed by companies and, from the 1850s, Burial Boards their function was solely to read the burial service. At cemeteries where a large number of interments took place in common graves, a ‘public reading time’ was held where unrelated families were present for a communal reading of the burial service by the chaplain. This continued until the dramatic shift towards cremation in the post-war years effectively brought an end to such ceremonies.The repetitive nature of the chaplain’s task, […]

The constant population growth leads to a physical expansion of urban areas, resulting in a denser built environment with the overlapping of services to support human needs. For this reason, verticalization became necessary to optimize land use and occupation in large cities, where there is a limited amount of available land for new buildings. In this context, a building typology that has been facing these issues is the cemetery because of its increasing need of land for new burials. […]

Cemeteries are an integral part of the cityscape, which as a societal function are responsible for the interment of the deceased in a dignified manner. They are imbued with cultural, historical, religious and emotional significance – as a site for grief, reflection and contemplation they also have a significant physical presence in the city. Cemeteries are a somewhat hidden issue in urban planning in Sweden today, but as a land intensive development that locks the land from future reuse it is paramount that the complexity is examined. […]

This paper reviews cemetery publications over the last twenty years and considers current trends and new directions. In these two decades, cemetery research has included contributions from the humanities, social sciences and sciences and its international reach has expanded substantially, echoing the expansion in geographic scope of death studies. The study of cemeteries has also benefitted from a spatial turn within a number of disciplines: within death studies, conceptions of ‘deathscapes’ or ‘necroscapes’ has expanded the range of questions asked of all locations where death is encountered. […]

‘Truelove and Dear are names which would suggest a very amicable partnership, yet they are owned by a couple of St. Kilda citizens who are continually at war with one another.’ – The Age, 1903. The story of Charles Truelove and Nathaniel Dear reads like a plot arc on a television soap opera. Both were employees at the St Kilda Cemetery in Melbourne, Australia during the late nineteenth century. Dear, an independent grave decorator, loved to hate Truelove, […]

This presentation is based on interviews and archives analysis conducted in 2019 in Sète, France, and aims at underlining the role of the burial reselling process in France in the evolution of a famous cemetery and the sociology of the person buried there. The Cimetière Marin (maritime cemetery) is a well-known cemetery in France, thanks to Paul Valéry’s poem, “Le Cimetière Marin”, and has a unique situation, as it faces the Mediterranean Sea from a hillside. […]

​​As the first urban cemetery in Chile, the General Cemetery of Santiago was conceived as a model for the new republican cemeteries, devoid from religious background and with carefully arranged distribution of the burial plots, reflecting the power relations of the society of the living. Based on the assumption that it is in fact possible to read socio-cultural and socio-economic phenomena by studying relevant artefacts on cemeteries, the researchers propose an interdisciplinary approach to the use of these spaces as investigation resources. […]

The 1925 closure of Newcastle gaol presented the local authorities with a major dilemma, namely the Home Office’s request for the proper reinterment of the bodies of 15 executed criminals. The highly secretive operation, the exact reinternment location of the remains is still unknown today, became the subject of great speculation in the local newspapers and was the cause of much local debate. Through a study of the Home Office and Prison Commission correspondence regarding the exhumations, […]

The internet provides an ideal forum to involve and engage diverse groups of people in the vast resources of historic cemeteries. A survey of existing websites dedicated to nineteenth-century cemeteries revealed that the information available is patchy and inconsistent. Most provide an overall history of the site with some information on notable burials, but insight beyond this is limited. Additionally, websites set up by volunteer groups or individuals are extremely vulnerable to being taken offline due to lack of funds. […]

The ‘Magnificent Seven’ cemeteries that were opened by private companies in London between 1832 and 1841 included Abney Park at Stoke Newington. The company later went on to establish cemeteries at Chingford Mount (1884) and Hendon Park (1899) followed by the acquisition of Greenford Park Cemetery in 1905. In 1922, a crematorium was opened at Hendon. By the 1950s, however, the company was divesting itself of its assets with all the four sites eventually ending up in the ownership of the local authorities in which each was situated. […]

Established in 1836 by the South Metropolitan Cemetery Company, Norwood Cemetery was the second of the garden cemeteries to open in London. The burden of continuously maintaining such expansive tracts rendered most of these enterprises insolvent within the next hundred years. Lambeth Council eventually assumed ownership of Norwood, and in the 1960s elected to clear a sizable number of the cemetery’s monuments without considering the architectural and historical legacy enshrined in that place nor the resultant obliteration of the dead’s identity. […]

In many major cities, the ‘first’ nineteenth-century cemetery is often the focus of cemetery tourism, a leisure activity which has increasing infrastructure support through organisations such as the Association for Significant Cemeteries in Europe. This paper recognises ‘funerary heritage’ as an associated but separate development, which recognises the value of understanding and protecting evidence of funeral practices in the past. There can be an uneasy relationship between cemetery tourism and funerary heritage, in part resting on unwillingness directly to associate cemetery visits with death. […]

John Claudius Loudon, the noted cemetery designer, first mentioned the use of ‘railroads’ to transport the dead to cemeteries in 1830, at a time when public railways were only just beginning. Loudon repeats the proposal in his 1843 book On the Laying Out, Planting and Managing of Cemeteries. This paper examines the nature of Loudon’s proposal and considers it in the context of the development of out-of-town cemeteries and the virtually simultaneous development of the railway network from 1830 onwards. […]

Brookwood Cemetery holds the highest concentration of minority burial grounds in the UK, including the first Zoroastrian burial ground established in Europe (1862), as well as a wide range of Muslim burial grounds. While previously largely undocumented, the project will work with Surrey History Centre to make the burial grounds more widely known and understood. Alongside a systematic collection of documentation, 30 volunteer-led oral history interviews will explore memories of remembrance, collective identity and belonging. This presentation will address the objectives and design of a Lottery-funded project aimed at documenting the history and continued significance of minority burial grounds in Brookwood Cemetery, […]

Contrary to the British case, burial legislation in France, Luxembourg and most German federal states does not allow for body interment outside the confines of a cemetery or churchyard. Cremated remains are, however, allowed to be buried or dispersed in a so-called natural environment according to new legal dispositions. High cremation rates alone do not provide a sufficient explanation for these changes, as the East German (GDR) example shows but urns remained at the cemeteries (Schulz, […]

Discovering England’s Burial Spaces (DEBS) was a Historic England funded project hosted by the Centre for Digital Heritage, Digital Creativity Labs and the Archaeology Data Service (ADS) at the University of York, in collaboration with the Universities of Glasgow and Liverpool. We worked with community groups to develop new digital tools and resources for burial space recording, research and dissemination. One of the project’s core outputs is a new pilot national database for burial space research, […]

Westgate Hill and St John’s cemeteries in Newcastle-upon-Tyne may possess listed status and therefore be deemed worthy of preservation by Historic England, but these Victorian cemeteries are currently undervalued by their host communities and – to various degrees – disengaged from their lives. Since, in an age of public funding cuts, local communities play increasingly important roles in the conservation of historic cemeteries, these neglected cemeteries are now in a state of disrepair, having been added to Historic England’s list of ‘heritage at risk’.This paper will endeavour to critically expose why St John’s and Westgate Hill cemeteries are failing to engage with their host communities and other potential communities of interest. […]