​​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. […]

This paper aims to summarize the preliminary findings of a PhD research project analysing the materiality and spatiality of graves and grave markers on four selected cemeteries in the Luxembourg-German border region. By collecting an extensive set of data of the contemporary assemblage visible on these cemeteries and by analysing it statistically and geo-spatially, it is the intention to understand how this particular material and spatial assemblage came to be and, moreover, what historical archaeologists can learn from such data about the recent past. […]

The death of children is memorialised variously across cultures and generation, having moved beyond the cemetery in recent decades. When a child dies today there may be multiple material sites of remembrance – the home, the roadside following traffic fatalities, the school gates, central public places, online virtual memorials, as well as traditionally-commemorated places of burial such as cemeteries, graveyards and gardens of remembrance. This exploratory paper uses a spatial lens to seek to understand changing spaces and family practices associated with the public memorialisation of infants and children in urban England. […]

The Third cemetery of Athens (Greece) is an ordinary, fully-operating public cemetery. It was established in 1938; it is the third and last cemetery owned and managed by the Municipality of Athens; the only one located at the west side of the city; and the city’s biggest cemetery, the massive cemetery of the metropolis. This paper is based on primary sources data (Laws, Regulations, City Council minutes [1936-2003]) gathered and studied during the first year of the PhD research on the Third cemetery. […]

This paper is drawn from a case study which in turn forms part of a larger project on the religiosity of ordinary people in WW1, as seen through their headstones. The bulk of the project data lies in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) headstones, which form the first, mass, collection of British headstone inscriptions. The study of CWGC headstone Personal Inscriptions is itself threaded through with evidential problems, and contested information. For example, present research suggests that around 50% of identifiable graves have no inscription at all. […]

A very detailed study of about 1500 accounts of tours of Wales has shown that the custom of placing of flowers on graves was practiced over most of Wales probably as early as the 17th century and definitely during the 18th and 19th centuries. There is very little evidence for this custom in England, Scotland and Ireland until it became popular in England from the 1830s, probably as a result of the opening of large non-denominational cemeteries on the edge of towns. […]

Drawing from consultation responses and the policy guidance currently in progress, this paper will explore the likely short-term impact of the 2016 Scottish Burial and Cremation (Scotland) Act on cemetery management practices. In 2016, the Scottish Government updated the primary legislation governing burial and cemetery management. This Act ended the tradition of burial in perpetuity, enabled grave reuse and sought to clarify procedures for burial authorities to deal with ‘ownerless’ graves and gravestones across all types of burial sites. […]

This paper follows the same journey made through two WW2 military cemeteries located on the outskirts of the city of Luxembourg. These are the Luxembourg American Cemetery and Memorial designed by the architects Keally & Patterson and landscape architect Alfred Geiffert; and the German Military Memorial Cemetery designed by the landscape architect Robert Tischler. The paper uses original plans, drawings and photographs to explore how the designers responded to very different design briefs that were inevitably shaped by their respective experience of victory and defeat. […]

This talk will draw on the conceptual framework underpinning my thesis, which analogises corpse materials as waste, otherwise known as ‘necro-waste’ (Olson, 2016). The thesis specifically asks ‘what is the value of “necro-waste”?’ In other words, it aims to understand how corpse materials can be recycled as the UK Death Industry develops alongside wider environmental social change. By taking a waste-orientated approach to corpse materials, the talk sets out to achieve two things. First, it will provide a comparative analysis of cremation and natural burial, […]

Highgate Cemetery was established by an Act of Parliament which regulated its operations. But how did they decide what should be in that Act? Was it based on earlier Acts establishing cemeteries? Tracing back to the first of such Acts, I realised that my question would remain: what did they base that one on? So my focus switched from finding the first cemetery Act to understanding how the first cemetery was governed. But which was the first cemetery? […]