Although cremation commenced in 1885, it would be eighty later before burial was replaced as the preferred mode of disposal of the dead in England & Wales. Whilst this reflected a national shift, research highlights the existence of a significant regional variation. Focusing on the south west London/north Surrey area and using funeral directors records as the source of data, it can be established that the preference for cremation was reached at least a decade earlier. […]

This presentation reviews the politics and processes that were followed when the parish burial ground of St George’s Hanover at Bayswater was cleared in the winter of 1969. The story has been revealed through the investigation a single 6’6 x 2’6 burial plot at West Norwood Cemetery that holds thousands of remains exhumed and transported there for cremation and reburial there. The Bayswater ground operated for nearly a century before being closed in 1852, and was the last resting place of many notable Georgians, […]

This paper is intended to look into the possibility of the adaptive re-use of closed and disused urban burial grounds as public green spaces, as well as the possibility of expanding the use of an active burial ground to include use as a green space. This will be done by engaging with previous work on the subject, ranging from the pioneering suggestions made in John Claudius Loudon’s seminal book of 1843, to the use of burial grounds as green spaces today by local authorities and community groups. […]

My undergraduate dissertation focused on the use of landscape and monuments in Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, between 1804 and 1915. It also examined the effect that monuments to significant or famous individuals had on cemetery development. My PhD thesis aims to build on this work by comparing the patterns seen at Père Lachaise to British garden cemeteries. The principal case studies for this comparative analysis are Highgate Cemetery (London), Glasgow Necropolis, Cathays Cemetery (Cardiff) and Key Hill Cemetery (Birmingham). […]

Much practical and theoretical research has been carried out by architectural and art historians on the influx of effigial tombs and mortuary memorials in churches during the 16th and 17th centuries in Britain. Archaeological interest is more spasmodic and often concentrates on such monuments in their idealised forms. What has become clear in my own recent research are the ways in which such tombs have subsequently been reduced, mutilated, moved around and occasionally totally removed from their original settings inside their churches. […]

Mount Saint Lawrence, Limerick is the fifth largest cemetery in the Republic of Ireland with an area of eighteen acres and a total of 75,000 burials. It contains some 10,750 grave-markers, ranging from huge Celtic crosses to tiny iron crosses. This paper will present the findings of a survey conducted of the grave-markers in Mount Saint Lawrence. It will examine them according to typology, style, material and location within the Cemetery. Also examined will be the mortuary chapel and the two public monuments housed within the Cemetery. […]

This paper explores the placing of sex in the landscape of disused burial grounds. Whilst legend-tripping literature considers graveyard sex as an intention-led activity aimed at raising the dead or invoking magic, my research uncovered a different facet of cemetery sex. Everyday conjugation in the sites I studied was driven by convenience, privacy and perhaps the edgework-esque thrill of heightened aliveness in a place of death.  In unpicking the experiences and opinions of research participants, I explore the tensions amongst the living, […]

Largely prompted by the expansion of the urban population during the nineteenth century, in just over a seventy year period commencing 1830 the whole arena of death and disposal was transformed through legal, social, economic and religious influences. Legislation regulated the supply of bodies for anatomical dissection, death registration and the establishment of proprietary and Burial Board cemeteries along with formalising the function of the coroner, the construction of mortuaries and the first cremations. In addition, […]

This presentation reports on a research task undertaken for English Heritage: to devise and test a framework for establishing the significance of burial space for use in the planning process. The framework had to encompass a range of circumstances in which burial has taken place, from deep time Neolithic barrows, to historic cemeteries and churchyards and modern war cemeteries and woodland burial sites. The framework also needed to accommodate ‘marginal’ sites including institutional burial grounds and battlefields and be compliant with the National Policy Planning Framework significance categories. […]

This paper will examine Limerick’s Mount Saint Lawrence in the context of the development of Irish municipal cemeteries. It will examine the circumstances of their establishment, their governance, dimensions, religious affiliation and funerary art. From 1830, garden cemeteries appeared all over Ireland. One of the first and most unusual was St Josephs in Cork which was founded by temperance reformer Fr Theobald Mathew when he purchased the defunct Botanic Gardens there in 1830. Dublin acquired two large cemeteries in the same decade, […]

This paper is taken from a dissertation which is the first large scale study focussing on a substantial group of individuals deposited in catacombs over a significant time period.  It summarises a variety of social characteristics of more than 600 people deposited in the Terrace Catacombs in Highgate Cemetery, London, during 1839-1878.  Using primary records, the demographics, occupations, prosperity, residence at time of death and relationships to others interred in the Terrace Catacombs are shown. The data reveal a largely homogeneous social group of prosperous people mostly from residential areas near to Highgate.  […]

Mors ianua vitae: death is the gate of life. This Christian topos found literal embodiment in a group of churchyard portals. Each sported emblems of mortality – skulls, skeletons, and most spectacularly the Last Judgment. Originally numbering just over a dozen, these unusual examples of Anglican architecture parlante are considered as a group for the first time. Their most likely initial source lay in Amsterdam. Hendrick de Keyser’s designs for doors to major new churches constituted over half the plates in Architectura Moderna (1631), […]

Studies of the material culture of cemeteries often concentrate on funerary monuments, chapels and other visible structures. This paper, by contrast, looks below the surface of the Glasgow Necropolis (first burial 1832) to examine rock-cut and brick-lined graves, family vaults, trenches for common burials, chambers for temporary burial and proposed catacombs. It also discusses the drains. This presentation will show that Scotland’s first ornamental, or garden, cemetery was as innovative below the ground as it was above, […]

The introduction of garden cemeteries in Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century has been seen as heralding a radical change in attitudes towards burial and commemoration. By the turn of the twentieth century a new form of cemetery aesthetic, the lawn cemetery, started to emerge. Until recently, lawn cemeteries have largely been viewed as a triumph of the economy of management over cultural values and as evidence of society’s emotional disengagement with death.  […]

The crudeness of crafting inscriptions on headstones declined in the late eighteenth century, even though some headstones were crafted using calligraphic inscriptions. This shift in styles reflected a change from a craft to an industry.  The use of varied inscription styles was meant to aid in differentiating the different types of text. However, the choice of font was also, to some extent, meant to match the shape and decorative motifs chosen for the headstone. In some cases, […]

The cemetery movement (ca. 1825-1850) was partly a reaction to the decay of Anglican churchyards and crypts, particularly in cities. Through private capital, promoters built cemeteries independent of parochial authorities, fuelled by a demand from wealthy urban classes and Nonconformists for alternative burial options. However, the Church’s reaction to these projects proved uneven: at a time when State-sponsored church construction was at its zenith, some viewed cemeteries as undermining the church’s spiritual monopoly over the dead, […]

The origins of the superintendent can be traced back to the establishment of proprietary cemeteries in the mid-nineteenth century. Responsible for day-to-day operations including supervision of grave preparation and routine maintenance along with administration and staffing, the remit has gained complexity through increased bureaucratisation and legislation, the preference for cremation and more recently from customer focus and centralisation of the service. Whilst the contemporary function has been comparatively well documented, little has been written about the development of the occupation in the early twentieth century. […]

Many historic cemeteries have only escaped from clearance or dereliction because of campaigns and direct management by friends’ groups. Despite a growing interest in cemeteries among conservation professionals in recent years, the involvement of local groups remains crucial, particularly for cemeteries of local rather than national interest. There has however been little examination of the factors behind the involvement of friends’ groups and the resulting impact of their work on cemetery character. Historic cemeteries are rich in meaning and local value, […]

The advent of the Industrial Revolution in the second part of the eighteenth-century England was fuelled by the invention of mechanical devices such as the hydraulic pump.  The adoption of this machine had a fundamental impact in trade, commerce as well as transport. Its influence eventually reached out to unusual applications such as that of the catafalque – a mechanical device based on the principle of the hydraulic pump – which became a fashionable feature in nineteenth-century Victorian necropolises. […]

The first of the Burial Acts were introduced in the 1850s, and discussion of this legislation generally focuses on the mid-century period. However, it is arguably the case that the most radical of the Burial Acts was the penultimate Act, passed in 1900. This Act – unlike earlier Burial Acts – did not favour the interests of the Church of England and was decidedly secular in tone. Rather than presuming that each cemetery would be consecrated, […]