This article is taken from the October 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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The graveyard in the city has long been an object of anxiety and municipal frustration. In his last years, the venerable Christopher Wren advised that any new churches in urban areas should not have graveyards attached to them. He had seen first-hand the unpleasant and unhygienic effects of overstuffed graveyards in the City of London, centuries of burials pushing the ground level as high as the church windows.

Instead, he proposed the foundation of new, spacious cemeteries, ringing the suburbs of the city with a “graceful border”, so that “the dead need not be disturbed at the pleasure of the sexton, or piled four or five upon one another”. He envisioned orderly avenues lined with yew trees, and serried ranks of monuments “regulated by an Architect and not left to the fancy of every Mason”.

Wren’s recommendations weren’t carried out in his lifetime, and his anxiety about the urban graveyard were still present over a century later, when Charles Dickens wrote A Tale of Two Cities, set in late 18th-century London. The novel features an insalubrious vision of the grave-robber Jerry Cruncher, with a shovel over his shoulder and dirt under his nails, scrabbling about in the dark, exhuming the recently interred in the churchyard of Old St Pancras.

Another great voice of gothic England, Thomas Hardy, was himself employed as a surveyor overseeing the works at Old St Pancras as the Midland Mainline ploughed right through the middle of the graveyard. Hardy’s ingenious solution for the hundreds of suddenly displaced gravestones was to arrange them haphazardly amongst the roots of an ash tree [1] in the half of the churchyard untouched by the hard steel of the new St Pancras train station.

It was the unprecedented explosion of London’s population in the Victorian period that finally forced the hand of the authorities, and made something like Wren’s vision a reality. In 1832 Parliament passed a Cemetery Act, which removed barriers to founding new cemeteries on the fringes of the capital. This led to the creation of the “Magnificent Seven”, a ring of consecrated ground on an unprecedented scale, arranged from Abney Park in the north to Nunhead in the South.

These crowded and peaceful corners of Zone 3 offer a smorgasbord, a testament to the eclectic pomp and sometime mawkish piety of Victorian good taste. The cemeteries often have divisions of real estate. At Highgate the prime location for your Forever Home was the Circle of Lebanon, a sunken circus of family tombs [2], topped by a great cedar tree, tragically lost to old age in 2019. The Circle is overlooked by John Oldrid Scott’s Julius Beer Museum, the owner of the Observer choosing to mark his passing with a scaled-down Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, complete with Quattrocento Italianate marble interiors.

At Kensal Green Cemetery, the great and the good stand amongst the yews, lining the central avenue approaching the Anglican chapel. Dukes, circus magnates, colonial administrators, soldiers and artists all jockey for position in a clamour of different styles, slowly succumbing together to moss and ivy. The circus impresario and equestrian Andrew Ducrow plumps for an Egyptianate pyramid flanked by trumpeting angels, Major-General Casement rests beneath a canopy borne on the heads of four turbaned telamons [3]. Down the hill, by the canal, the dissenters’ chapel stands with its back to the wall.

These hierarchies of space and faith often assert themselves. The most compelling part of West Norwood cemetery is its eastern fringe, where the small space allotted to the Greek orthodox community overbrims with an incomparable cacophony of cupolas and columns [4] , standing under a sublime Doric portico. The cemetery is a message to posterity and a way to assert status, but it is also an opportunity to forge community and grieve together, marking loss.

For all that we think of the emotional repression of the nineteenth century, these memorials speak of the heightened and public emotionality of mourning. Bold fonts proclaim “to her”, [5] an angel flies on a wing and a prayer, a widow kneels supplicant before her lost husband and raises her hand to his chin, grief palpable through centuries of weathering.

It is much rarer today that we mark our passing in such grandiloquent style. It perhaps seems a little gauche. In Roman antiquity, at the festival of Feralia, families would visit the graves of their relatives and take offerings. Some grave monuments of reclining figures were even designed with in-built wine cups, which would empty through a small hole over the course of the ceremony to give the illusion that your lost beloved was drinking. Even as we stand on a different landscape of faith today, the maintenance of ritual and respect to the dead is an irresistible and totally necessary human instinct.

Nowhere is the scale of Victorian grief more palpable than at Brookwood in Surrey [6/7], a cemetery of over 500 acres founded in the 1850s and administered by the London Necropolis Company. The LNC had their own terminus at Waterloo, which would convey coffins and coachloads of attendant mourners to the rail platform at the centre of the vast, verdant complex.

The centre of the cemetery is today home to a community of Orthodox monks, caring for the relics of King Edward the Martyr, recovered on an archaeological dig in 1931. Across the sweep of the cemetery innumerable denominations and forms of faith find peace, from Zoroastrians to Victorian atheist and constitution al-crisis magnet Charles Bradlaugh. It is also the final resting place of the architectural superstar Zaha Hadid, with an understated monument that may have been more stylised had she not been taken so suddenly.

The London Necropolis Company’s strongly Victorian marketisation of death: the package funeral with transportation, monument and all-inclusive catering was a response to the perpetual crisis of space for the dead in the city. Many of the Magnificent Seven are still functioning graveyards, but with time, the space will run out, even as the Victorian monuments turn to dust. How we will continue to mark our passing in the city of the future is hard to imagine. Be it the new-fangled ecological savvy of aquamation favoured by Desmond Tutu, or some as yet untested alternative, one thing is certain: where there are people, there will always be graves.