Until the Victorian age burials of the dead in London took place in local churchyards; there were no provision for inhumation in dedicated cemeteries. Meanwhile, overcrowding of corpses in limited spaces created excellent opportunities for diseases and epidemics. Water supplies became polluted and the rat population prospered on the increased opportunities for feeding on churchyard decompositions. Moreover, because of increasing demand for dissection samples to be used in the city’s hospitals, the digging up and stealing of human remains provided an excellent means of employment for a nifty criminal fraternity known wittily as the ‘resurrectionists’.
Clearly something had to change, particularly in an age when London’s population was rapidly expanding. A parliamentary commission was sent to Paris and visited the new Père Lachaise cemetery, which has since become one of the French capital’s most evocative sites. Pleasantly surprised by the mortuary hygiene and posthumous elegance provided by a purpose-built burial ground the committee decided on a similar one for London.
The result was the Burial Act of 1832 which required new burial grounds in a list of urban parishes of London to be approved by the Secretary of State and enabled the closure of metropolitan churchyards to new interments making regulations regarding correct burial. This legislation led to the metropolis’ first modern cemetery: Kensal Green. Others followed in the capital. Between 1833 and 1841 West Norwood Cemetery, Highgate Cemetery, Abney Park Cemetery, Brompton Cemetery, Nunhead Cemetery, and Tower Hamlets Cemetery were established. They are now collectively known as the ‘Magnificent Seven’, both because they are indeed wonderful in their extent and faded grandeur and also because for me they remind one of the now sadly deceased cast of that fine western (modelled after a Japanese original) starring Yul Brynner.
We were privileged last Sunday to join a visit to Kensal Green cemetery, a visit organised by the Friends of this Grade One listed monument.
We saw the tombs of the great and the good whether they be writers like Thackeray or musicians like Cipriani Potter (named after an ancestor of my wife) or engineers like the Brunels father and son.
What particularly attracted me were the graves of James Hogg, friend of Shelley and co-author with him of the pamphlet for Atheism which got both of them sent down from Oxford, and his lovely wife Jane Hogg to whom Shelley dedicated several poems including the one addressed ‘To a Lady with a Guitar.’
Unlike the manicured layout and the highly restored tombs of our local Bagni di Lucca ‘English’. cemetery Kendal Green displays the archetypal decayed, moss covered , ivy, hanging burial ground. I felt this was the true atmosphere a cemetery containing the putrefaction of human flesh should have.
We passed fine statuary, monuments and chapels built in a variety of styles ranging from ancient Egyptian to Hellenic to Gothic to Neo-Platonism classical.
We entered into the sequestered gloom of the catacombs with the hope that none there might have been prematurely buried and that all measures would have been taken to prevent this horrible way to die from ever occurring. Would there have been any consumptive maidens unwrapped from yellowed winding sheets presumed expired before their day had really come, their broken nails dug into the dark wood of a sepulchral door with scratches blotched in blood? For if in Space no-one can hear you scream it is the same story if you are buried deep within the cold marble of a sepulchre!
Finally we encountered, for us,the most moving of all sights in Kensal Green Cemetery. We saw the cremation plaque to my wife’s beloved parents, my indulgent in-laws without whom I would have been unable to hold the soft hand by my side or to kiss those sweetest of lips. Requiescant in Pacem!
It is, indeed, a sobering thought to wander through a cemetery. Arising from cosmic dust through love we must all return to earthly dust through the pathway of death. More than ever before, listening to the profusion of birds singing their soul out and the scampering of foxes in the grass of the wilder parts of the cemetery, my senses awakened to the joy of being still alive, the bliss of at last walking in the first sunlit day London has had for some time, of being with a loved one by my side, of tasting the gift a greater one than I has given and that one just on loan until the final day on this planet arrives to find – one no one knows where, no one knows when – the moment where we go we know not where except that we know we shall never return to Kensal Green to walk it as we did today.
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From London to La Costa (and Lucca and Beyond) Part Three 