Grave re-use was common in the UK for hundreds of years, but legislation introduced in the mid-nineteenth century made the practice illegal.  As a result, cemeteries must continually expand in order to accommodate further interments.  Many cemeteries incorporate vast areas of old burial that generate no income, are no longer visited and are poorly maintained.  The recent proposal by Government to reintroduce grave re-use seems straightforward in theory, but UK cemeteries were not designed to be re-used.  […]

Some historians have argued that the Great War of 1914-1918 precipitated a decentring of the corpse from popular commemorative ritual. One piece of evidence routinely cited for this argument is increases in the cremation rate following the Great War. However, I would suggest that the Great War did not influence popular disposal and commemoration practices to the extent that some have argued, and that even today the body remains firmly at the centre of popular commemorative strategies. […]

Focusing on Bristol and York, this paper will present a general outline of the treatment of urban burial grounds during the long eighteenth century. It will consider their upkeep and their use for purposes other than burial, before considering the responses of parish authorities to their increasing overcrowding, which took the form of extensions or the establishment of separate additional burial grounds. As part of this, it will look at the ways in which burial grounds were continually reshaped in accordance with the needs of the living, […]

Throughout the nineteenth century, the city of Glasgow exhibited many of the difficulties in a rapidly urbanising and industrialising environment. Its high mortality rate and its poor levels of public health increased pressures on burying ground provision, further exacerbated by local patterns of wealth distribution and of migration, the structure of local government, and the characteristics of funeral arrangements in Presbyterian Scotland. These were the major factors behind the conditions in Glaswegian burying grounds which social reformer found unacceptable. […]

The pioneering St Mungo’s Burying Ground, which was established by Glasgow Town Council in 1832, introduced a number of modern and rational improvements over the crowded churchyards of the city. The three drivers of the cemetery were a rapidly rising population, a cholera epidemic and a changing set of beliefs around burial and commemoration. The cemetery was remarkable in a number of ways: it was lit by gas, drained by sewers, planted with shrubs and had wide carriage roads round and through it. […]

Despite the increasing profile of cremation in England during the interwar years, local authorities still needed to provide land for the preferred mode of disposal – burial. Those in urban areas with nineteenth century cemeteries approaching capacity looked outside their boundaries for suitable sites. In 1929 the Urban District Council of Willesden acquired land for burial purposes in an adjacent municipal area. Although it was not immediately prepared for burials, over the next thirty years the authority encountered an unprecedented level of opposition from Wembley borough. […]

The paper is concerned with the analysis of interview transcripts and aims to provide insights into personal perceptions of death, dying, and care of the deceased. The interview data draws on initial research undertaken as part of a three-year ESRC funded project considering the cultural, social and emotional implications of funerary practices, grouped under the generic term of ‘natural burial’. The project will consider how varied interpretations, typologies and memorial practices have created diverse burial landscapes. […]

By 1930 the campaign for cremation was fifty-six years old. Yet the persistence of the British burial tradition had confounded most attempts by cremation’s promoters to persuade the British to adopt cremation as an alternative to burial. In 1930 over 99% of funerals involved burial. The Council for the Disposition of the Dead (CDD) was a new initiative of the Cremation Society, intended to promote cremation as one of several funeral reforms. These reforms would be pursued in cooperation with a wide range of other organisations both within funeral service and beyond, […]

What happens to the geraniums when an avid gardener dies? In this paper I suggest that it is possible to map ways in which domestic places and spaces get enacted in and negotiated through engagements with death. Drawing upon ongoing research into New Zealand’s and UK’s attitudes to and practices around death, the paper discusses ways in which domestic suburban gardens operate as, and become sites to, renegotiate social relationships transformed through death.

In 2001, the House of Commons Environment, Transport and Regional Affairs Committee published its findings following an inquiry into UK cemeteries.  One of their key recommendations was: ‘if the public are to continue to have access to affordable, accessible burial in cemeteries fit for the needs of the bereaved, there appears to be no alternative to grave re-use’. Cemeteries were first established during the Victorian period to tackle problems of poor sanitation and lack of churchyard space in cities.  […]

One does not have to look far nowadays to find evidence in the modern media of cemeteries making the news (see BBC 2003; 2005; 2006). Be it grave desecration, memorial regulation or safety in the local cemetery, they are sites that can frequently garner press attention, usually not for the most favourable of reasons. However, this attention does not equate to a general rise in the profile of cemeteries across the country which, this paper suggests, […]

During the course of my ethnographic fieldwork West Norwood Cemetery, one of the ‘Magnificent Seven’ Victorian cemeteries in London, became one of the focus points of my research. One of the main questions encountered throughout my work is how contemporary practices within the material and social dimension of the cemetery shape its future, with a particular emphasis on Victorian cemeteries as contested landscapes, contemporary heritage practices and material culture. This paper will explore these three themes from an anthropological perspective using an in-depth case-study of West Norwood Cemetery in order to provide ethnographic context. […]

Within the last decade there has been a revival in museum and heritage studies, reflecting the growth of their cultural and economic role in contemporary Western society. Whilst there have been some efforts to explore how cemeteries could benefit from this revival, to date cemeteries have not been widely included or recognised as ‘heritage’ spaces in either policy or research. This paper addresses this disparity and makes tentative links between cemeteries and museums in their wider social, […]

In 1899 the manager of a privately-owned cemetery appeared in court in Aberdeen. He had ensured sufficient burial space by exhuming and relocating coffins without authority or permission. The manager was imprisoned for six months and the city of Aberdeen made aware of the conditions in which the poor of the city were buried. The cremationist Dr Robert Farquharson, MP for East Aberdeen, used the occasion to press for a crematorium, cremation having been legalised in the UK in 1884. […]

From Lewis Mumford’s influential model of urban civilisation terminating in ‘the final cemetery, the Necropolis’ to Iain Sinclair’s vision of contemporary London as a ‘necropolis culture’, twentieth-century commentators have repeatedly defined the modern metropolis as a city of the dead. The dominance of necropolitan discourse in London literature has had a significant impact on representations of the city’s cemeteries, ahistorically subordinating the particular local, historical, ideological and affective characteristics of individual cemeteries to a transcendent vision of cemetery as city of the dead – in the terms of James Thomson’s 1874 poem, […]

This paper presents some preliminary findings of a study of headstones and burial records from the Unitarian chapel at Stannington, some five kilometres north-west of Sheffield. The mismatch between individuals named on tombstones and individuals listed in burial records suggests that it may be useful to conceive of each burial plot as having its own individual “life history”, in the same way that archaeologists have talked of the life cycle of individual artefacts or structures. A number of ideas will be explored in relation to this model, […]

The natural burial movement established a new burial aesthetic in which the identity and location of the deceased is potentially known only to the burial ground manager and the family and friends of the deceased.  In the most common form of natural burial the grave is marked by the planting of a tree. There has been very little research on why people choose natural burial either for themselves or their loved ones.  There is also little known about the significance of the memorial tree to the deceased or the family and friends of the deceased.  […]

Visitors to cemeteries and churchyards exhibit a wide array of value systems, harbouring perceptions that range from sacred and sombre to scary or seductive. These values impact on behaviour and mean that cemeteries perform social roles varying in scope from a site of mourning to gang territory. The multiple roles, however, are not always complementary. This research examines real and potential conflict, resolution and the influence this has on the cemetery environment. In this paper we take two journeys in pursuit of deeper understanding of the social diversity in cemeteries. […]

The Berlin cemetery scene is marked by a complex cultural heritage administered in a decentralised manner. One hundred and ninety-one cemeteries are used for burials: the municipal Senate Administration runs 69, and 115 are owned by Protestant and Catholic parishes. There are also Jewish, Russian-Orthodox and Muslim burial grounds as well as a British cemetery. All the burial sites together amount to an area of 1,5 % of the whole metropolitan area. The Berlin Senate Administration estimated that about half of the city’s cemetery area is not required. […]

A funeral is not just the main event at church, crematorium or cemetery on the day; everything that precedes and follows that event is part of the funeral process. There is often another ceremony – freer in form and content, often smaller and more intimate – for the burial/scattering of ashes, planting of memorial trees, placing of memorial benches, erection of headstones, etc., after the first funeral. Here, families can take a greater role in saying goodbye to their loved one, […]