This investigation originates from a project on the inscriptions on the headstones maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. The Commonwealth War Cemeteries tend to be regarded as a cultural norm – even a British, or military tradition. Yet this phenomenon is not traditional, and is only British by virtue of the nationality of their founder and director, Sir Fabian Ware. His vision was in fact an international and Imperial one, and the ‘norms’ that the project produced were new both to the British Army and to the British civil polity. […]

Cemeteries and graveyards traditionally had one main role, however during the last 40 years many have evolved from burial space to visitor space. It is now possible to watch a film, view art, take a tour or watch theatre in a place of the dead. How and why did this transition occur? Is the presence of the human remains part of the draw to these sites, or a hinderance to their new uses? Drawing from experiences working in heritage sites and current doctoral research this presentation will share one case study that shows how the change can take place. […]

This paper suggests a new meta-narrative for understanding change in Westernised funerary practice over time, shifting away from the conception of dichotomised swings between periods when death was somehow hidden or problematic, and times during which death was regarded as ‘tame’, accepted and largely unproblematic. Instead, this it is proposed that funerary practice runs rather in a cyclical pattern, as innovation, gradually absorbed as a mass option, provokes new innovation. This pattern not seated within the desire for the lesser-status members of society to emulate the elite or garner ‘respectability’. […]

On the 25th October 1866, the family of four-year-old Jonathan Hope walked the two miles from Ancoats to bury their youngest son. He was the first person to be interred in a public grave at Manchester’s Philips Park Cemetery. By the end of the century the percentage of people interred in a public grave at Philips Park stood at just over 87% of all recorded burials. Despite the high numbers of public grave burials in municipal cemeteries throughout Britain, […]

Urban cemeteries in the Swedish city of Malmö witness a great variety of usages, and are not just limited to commemoration practices. However, the social acceptance of nonconventional activities on cemetery sites is still debatable. This paper aims to explore jogging as one among many activities in Malmö cemeteries and to understand people’s opinions about this activity. Three urban cemeteries, differing in size, location and design were examined through three methods: observations of activities, a study of social media and an online questionnaire. […]

The Burial Act 1852 created and empowered Burial Boards to provide cemeteries for the interment of those living within their parish. Financed by the fees from those interred, a higher non-parishioner charge was levied on those desirous of utilising the cemetery but not living within the Board’s boundary. Research has identified that although non-parishioner status remains today (and is now known as ‘non-resident’ burial), its intended purpose of preserving burial space through the deterrent of a higher charge has been subjected to wide interpretation. […]

‘He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery.’ This statement of the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom James Harold Wilson in 1967, exemplifies the most common perception of cemeteries as being insusceptible to change. But cemeteries are not ahistoric places and like any other human institutions they are exposed to changing socio-cultural, demographic, political, and economic parameters to which they are bound to respond. […]

This paper examines the history of the convent cemetery of the English Canonesses of the Holy Sepulchre, and associated changes to death, dying and burial practices within the community – physically, spiritually and culturally. Founded in Liège in 1642, where they lived as an English convent in exile for some 150 years, the Sepulchrines were forced to migrate from mainland Europe to England in 1794 as a result of revolutionary changes sweeping the continent. After arrival in England, […]

Archaeology students recorded one of the areas in Toxteth Park Cemetery as part of their archaeology field methods module. This paper described the process and assesses preliminary assessment of the effectiveness of this activity both as a pedagogic experience and as a contribution the recording and long-term management of the cemetery. Toxteth Park, as with most cemeteries in Liverpool, is managed by the local authority but is also supported by a friends’ group; it is listed on Historic England’s Parks and Gardens Register. […]

The cemetery and churchyard commonly present problems with maintenance issues, contentious memorialisation sensibilities, economics and allowing for an evolution of rituals and customs. If architecture began with the tomb, has the story line for cemetery design been lost along the way? This landscape interface between mortality and immortality could be seen as it has in the past, as the greatest design brief of all, but current design ethos is surely falling short. Is this landscape a place of exclusive use for the visiting bereaved and has it been so in the past? […]

George Alfred Walker was one of the very first sanitary reformers to be actively involved in the burial reform debate which took place in the 1840s in England. Although historical interest in Walker is not new, most historical works have focused on the sanitary reformer Edwin Chadwick. There are only a few academic articles specifically dedicated to Walker, and yet such articles never offer a thorough analysis of Walker’s contribution to the burial debate—although Peter Jupp had been calling for it since 1997 (The Changing Face of Death). […]

The young, beautiful and rich widow Giertrud Birgitte Bodenhoff was buried in Assistens cemetery, Copenhagen on 23 July 1798 but was she dead? Family stories claimed she had been buried alive but unconscious (skindød in Danish) from an excess of opium. They suggest that when grave robbers opened her coffin to steal her jewellery, she woke up and they killed her to conceal their crime. An exhumation on the 9 January 1953 took place to investigate the stories. […]

This paper will be delivered as an illustrated talk, using contemporary and historical images of St George’s Field and images of the artwork I have made in response to it. St George’s Field is now a disused cemetery within the grounds of Leeds University. Using Barthes Camera Lucida as a theoretical starting point and an interdisciplinary approach, it will contain an overview of St George’s Fields rich historical and social narrative and  will concentrate upon its transformation from farmland to cemetery to public park during the last two hundred years.  […]

In 2016, the Scottish Government updated the laws governing burial and cemetery management. The previous primary legislation, drafted in 1855, enshrined the ability to purchase burial rights in perpetuity. The 2016 act enables grave reuse and seeks to clarify procedures for burial authorities to deal with ‘ownerless’ graves and gravestones, many of which are historic in date. Local communities tend to perceive historic burial grounds as different from their ‘modern’ counterparts by virtue not only of their age but also by their incapacity to provide new burial space and it can be argued that this has resulted in a more ready acceptance of their greenspace and heritage values. […]

At the end of the Second World War the next of kin of American service men and woman who had been killed during the conflict, had a choice to either have the body repatriated or for the remains to be permanently interred in one of 14 Military Cemeteries and Memorials that would be created by the American Battle and Monuments Commission (ABMC). This paper draws on the memoirs of Major General Thomas North who in 1946 was appointed by General Eisenhower as Secretary of the ABMC with responsibility of overseeing the development of these new military cemeteries.  […]

This research explores the space of the cemetery and the importance of its role within today’s consumer culture in Germany. It acknowledges the cemetery as a heterotopia (Foucault, 1967/1984) – a material site which embodies a multiplicity of meanings that attach to a range of functions beyond “the disposal of human remains” (Rugg, 2000:260). Previous research has identified cemeteries as spaces of connectedness (Francis et al., 2000), of re-negotiation of the deceased’s identity (Francis et al., […]

The expansion of London during the early part of the nineteenth century prompted the opening of the first wave of proprietary cemeteries such as Kensal Green, Highgate and Abney Park. These were followed by Burial Board cemeteries established under the Burial Acts 1852 and 1853, along with a further raft of private burial grounds in the 1870s. However, after intensive usage for around sixty to seventy years it would be the interwar period when a third wave would emerge as burial grounds were nearing capacity; […]

Britain holds many early Victorian burial grounds that were built as a private speculation to house the dead of the growing and modernising cities. To mention them today is to conjure up images of un-maintained memorials falling into decay and submerged in undergrowth, while the site is neglected and bankrupt. A commonly-accepted wisdom is that this state came about as a result of a fundamentally-flawed business model. This argument assumes that the success of a privately-run cemetery was premised on a continuous supply of virgin land, […]

Detailed study of the St John’s Cemetery, Parramatta, New South Wales, reveals the rapid development of a regulated system of interment in a defined burial ground physically separated from the church. This is in sharp contrast to the first burial grounds in Sydney, now built over, which continued the British tradition of interment around Anglican places of worship and a pattern of overcrowding. Sydney was founded in early 1788, with Parramatta following by the end of that year as a farming centre. […]

Many people today imagine that cemetery tourism is a new phenomenon, part of the ‘heritage industry’. But some nineteenth-century cemeteries were intended as tourist attractions right from their earliest days, not just as places for the bereaved to mourn. Visitors would be improved by reading epitaphs, admiring the art of the memorials, and escaping the noise and pollution of the metropolis. Guidebooks were published and some cemeteries became so popular that ways had to be found to keep visitors out. […]