The British Cemetery – Architecture, Landscape, Sculpture is a comprehensive and authoritative view of a wide ranging and ultimately interesting subject, written by two expert authors. One is an eminent Horticultural and Garden historian, the other self-described as a Tomb historian and both have been involved with Heritage England at a senior and decisive level. They are hooked on cemeteries and the same could happen to anyone reading their book. The Introduction states that its aim is to show how historic cemeteries evolved and why they matter. The authors remind us:

‘Just how instructive these places [cemeteries] are. They tell us about life, society, taste, customs, religious attitudes, geology, cultural inspiration and much else besides, including the biggest subject of all: the place of death in life’.

Chapters on landscape design and modern developments of cemeteries are by Brent Elliott, and those about the early history of cemeteries, tombs, and sculptures, are by Roger Bowdler. A minor niggle is that all chapters and a well-written Introduction are not actually marked with either author’s name.

Britain’s cemeteries are explained as burial grounds unattached to churches. There were one or two earlier incarnations, but the Cemetery Movement really took off from the 1830s onwards. These places were badly needed, a solution to overcrowding and insanitary conditions in a time of cholera and, significantly, a necessary reaction to the previous exclusion of Dissenters and Catholics. New cemeteries were incorporated as companies with shareholders, municipal cemeteries soon followed.

Land was purchased at the edge of cities and towns of all sizes throughout Britain, and work began. Among those who designed and laid-out cemeteries, including Joseph Paxton, we hear of John Claudius Loudon (1783–1843). The one-armed Scottish gardener and author of On the Laying Out, Planting, and Managing of Cemeteries (1843) had become the arbiter of taste and practicality in establishing new grounds. A grid layout was used in hundreds of cases, with pathways, buildings, and areas planted with trees, shrubs and flowers. Loudon had coined the term ‘gardenesque’, aiming to create a promenade with viewpoints in the grand manner. He also started using the word ‘arboretum’ and recommended certain tree species. Elliott and Bowdler, as this illustrated compendium will be known, contains several maps of cemetery designs: in one engraving of 1856 there is a view of plantings at The London Necropolis, thirty miles from the city, at Brookwood cemetery, near Woking. Among fledgling conifers were Giant Sequoia, today a feature in themselves at 200 ft and rising.

Directors and designers looked for ideas in other cemeteries, especially the globally admired Cimetière du Père Lachaise in Paris. But Britons could also be fiercely critical, with one voice raised against the style of Italian cemeteries which ‘are all peep-show in dazzling marble’. Elsewhere there were complaints of dreary formulaic and repeated works.

The burial business called for buildings, with chapels, arched entrances, sheds and walls to separate the denominations of the deceased. John Bryce, William Hosking, designer of Abney Park, Stoke Newington, and William Flockton are among named architects, whose works are shown in photographs from Brent Elliott’s historic collection. As ever there were opposing styles, with neo-classical at Kensal Green and the vanished Liverpool Necropolis, or Neo-Gothic at Barnsley and Burngreave in Sheffield. There was idiosyncrasy too, with structures such as the large and apparently fortified Allan-Frazer mortuary chapel (1875–84) shown in one of Bowdler’s photographs in a chapter enticingly titled, ‘The High Victorian Cemetery Monument’. Architecture extended to a mausoleum resembling a temple, square tombs, and even pyramids, raised for wealthy clients, while staple items like headstones, pedestals, urns, and crosses could be obtained from monumental masons, some of whom set up their premises outside the cemetery gates.

Regarding sculpture in cemeteries, readers will find Roger Bowdler’s knowledge to the fore and his estimation of sculpture well judged. He identifies the 1892 Henry Douglas Freshfield memorial at Brookwood cemetery as an Aesthetic Movement monument. (Incidentally, it is also a Heritage England Listed Grade II monument, quite likely designated for Listing by Bowdler himself). Photographs are generally of a high standard, though images such as the Freshfield, and the nearby Pelham Clinton memorial, with its emotive bronze figures, could have been reproduced to advantage at a larger size.

History is brought up to date with reports of vandalism, failing businesses, restoration, and the present preference for cremation. There are new factors such as the rise of ‘woodland burials’ as at Colney, near Norwich, and the heaven-sent emergence of ‘Friends of the Cemetery’ in all areas, an evolution from the Friends of Highgate Cemetery, founded in 1975 by a group which included Sir John Betjeman. These days there seems to be a growing interest among local historians, genealogists, geologists, philosophers, artists and art historians, to whom this book is recommended.

The Appendices are a real bonus. On one page are all the Acts of Parliament relating to cemeteries. The bibliography lists nearly one thousand literary inputs to the subject, twenty-five of which are by the authors themselves. There follows an index of British cemeteries, an index of crematoria, another for churchyards and burial grounds, and another for the names of individual memorials, stonemasons and sculptors mentioned in the text. The last few pages of the book are an index of subjects and concepts, quite a treat for the researcher who can follow their specific preoccupation in anything cemetery-related, from spiritualism to sandblasting.

Sensibly the authors decided to omit the esoteric elements, which could have added a thousand pages: they and the editors deserve credit for being able to leave out some aspects. Anyone who owns a copy of The Victorian Celebration of Death by the late James Stevens Curl, and the indispensable London Cemeteries: An Illustrated Guide and Gazetteer by Hugh Meller and Brian Parsons, will want this reference work by Brent Elliott and Roger Bowdler. It is the sum of many years’ research and will become THE Cemetery Book for many years to come.

 

 

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