Necropolis: London & it's Dead (17 page)

In summing up, Sir William MacKinnon concluded: ‘That the duty of framing and introducing a Bill on the principles set forth in the foregoing Resolutions, would be most efficiently discharged by Her Majesty’s Government, and that it is earnestly recommended to them by the Committee.’
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But legislation is time-consuming, and it was to be another ten years before a Bill against interment in towns was introduced. The Act to Amend the Laws Concerning the Burial of the Dead in the Metropolis, commonly known as the Burials Act, 15 and 16 Victoria, was finally passed in 1851. After that, notices were issued for the termination of interments in vaults and graveyards all over London. The list printed on 1 January 1855, of graveyards remaining open, was a short one–and in many cases, only vaults could be used. The Home Secretary was inundated with letters from London residents, begging for the Act to be enforced in their neighbourhoods, along with applications to open cemeteries on the
outskirts of the town. Predictably, there were objections to closures by the investors who stood to make money out of burial grounds, but the environment eventually began to improve.

Thomas Miller, the journalist who had lived through the cholera epidemics, noted:

The streets were no longer darkened with funerals; you no longer saw men running in every direction with coffins on their heads, knocking at doors, and delivering them with no more ceremony or feeling than the postman delivers his letters. The solemn hearse and the dark mourning-coach now moved slowly along, and the dead were borne away to green and peaceful cemeteries, far removed from the dwellings of the living.
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The closure of the inner-city burial grounds was just one factor in London’s sanitary reform. The city reeked for nearly another decade. It was not until the problem was literally under the Government’s nose that real action was taken. During the ‘Great Stink’ of June 1858, the stench arising from the Thames forced the House to adjourn. The stench was so overpowering that the curtains of the Commons were soaked in chloride of lime in a vain attempt to protect the sensitivities of MPs. Disraeli referred to the river as a ‘Stygian pool’ and tons of lime were dumped in it every day.

The House had been reviewing the Metropolitan Board of Works proposal for a system that would prevent sewage passing into the Thames in or near the Metropolis for the previous three years. The arrival of the Great Stink saw the Bill rushed through Parliament in eighteen days. The scheme had been created by Joseph Bazalgette (1819–91), one of the most distinguished civil engineers of the period. After considerable experience on railway projects, he was appointed Chief Engineer of the Metropolitan Board of Works in 1855. The Great Stink was the start of the sewer system as we know it today. Bazelgette built eighty-three miles of
pipes that prevented raw sewage running into the Thames and took it to the east of London, where it joined the river with minimal effect on the population.

Following the closure of the inner-city burial grounds, and the founding of Thomas Miller’s ‘green and peaceful cemeteries’ in the outlying suburbs, Londoners were now burying their dead beyond the city walls, just as the Romans had. This did not resolve the problem for long, however. Although space was allocated for common graves, the majority of plots were restricted to those affluent enough to afford them. But it is these Victorian Valhallas, as much as the ‘pestiferous graveyards’, which define the nature of death and burial in nineteenth-century London.

7: VICTORIAN VALHALLAS

The Development of London’s Cemeteries

The great cemeteries of the nineteenth century demonstrate the sheer inventiveness of the Victorians, who could confront the issues of death and the disposal of the dead, and produce such innovative solutions as the coffin lift and the well-designed catacomb. John Claudius Loudon, Stephen Geary, Francis Goodwin and Benjamin Baud represented a triumph in the combined disciplines of architecture, landscape gardening and engineering. Falling eagerly upon all sorts of architectural styles, from Greek to Gothic, these engineers and designers created the quintessential London graveyard, wherein Egyptian pyramids jostle with weeping angels and Grecian urns stand alongside Celtic crosses.

The entrepreneurial Victorian spirit, coupled with genuine concerns over public health, led to the development of seven magnificent cemeteries, all within a six-mile radius of Central London; they surround the city like figures on a clock.

The legislation which permitted the first, Kensal Green, to open in 1833, paved the way for Norwood (1837), Highgate (1839), Abney Park (1840), Brompton (1840), Nunhead (1840) and Tower
Hamlets (1841). Of these, Highgate remains the most spectacular, although the sheer scale of Kensal Green is awe-inspiring.

Whilst Chadwick and Walker were lobbying to ‘remove burial from populous places’, entrepreneurs had already seized on the opportunity to invest in death. The lack of adequate burial space within London led inevitably to the founding of new cemeteries on the outskirts of town. It was only a matter of time before the outrageous fantasies of a giant pyramid in Primrose Hill or a British Père Lachaise achieved some form of reality, in the hands of astute property speculators.

In May 1830, a letter from the gifted inventor and landscape gardener John Claudius Loudon appeared in the
Morning Advertiser:

Sir,

Observing by the reports from the Commons House in this day’s paper, that the above subject is likely to soon undergo discussion, allow me to suggest that there should be several burial grounds, all, as far as practicable, equidistant from each other, and from what may be considered the centre of the metropolis; that they be regularly laid out and planted with every sort of hardy trees and shrubs; and that in interring, the ground be used on a plan similar to that adopted in the burial grounds of Munich, and not left to chance like Père Lachaise. These and every other burial ground in the country might be made, at no expense whatever, botanic gardens; for, were nurserymen and gardeners invited, I am certain they would supply, everyone to his own parish, gratis, as many hardy trees and shrubs, and herbaceous plants, as room could be found for. It would be for the clergy and the vestries to be at the expense of rearing these trees if they choose, which I think they ought to do, if they get them for nothing.

The burial places of the metropolis ought to be made sufficiently large to serve at the same time as breathing places, and most churchyards in the country are now too small for the increasing population. To accomplish the above and other metropolitan improvements properly, there ought to be a standing commission, for the purpose of taking into consideration whatever might be suggested for the general improvement, not only of London, but also of the environs.
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Architects and planners were quick to take note of Loudon’s suggestion. Joint stock companies devoted to the foundation of new cemeteries sprang into being. Joint stock companies were limited liability enterprises, comprising a number of individual members or shareholders who each held a stock in the company. Cemeteries had become a form of property development.

To meet the demand for out-of-town burial, enterprising individuals, often architects and engineers, purchased suitable tracts of land, sold shares to finance the layout of new ground and the erection of chapel and office buildings, then sold plots at a profit and reinvested the capital, to the benefit of the shareholders. The success of the ventures was a reflection of the general investment mania that flourished between 1820 and 1840, and saw massive investment in domestic enterprises such as banking, life assurance, mining, railways and steam navigation.

Private cemeteries also represented a general drive towards civic adornment in the form of municipal buildings, schools, churches, parks, which was characteristic of the age and was reflected throughout Victorian Britain, in cities such as Glasgow, Manchester, Nottingham and Leeds.
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Although his previous scheme for a British Père Lachaise had been turned down in 1824, the barrister and burial reformer George Frederick Carden established the provisional committee of a General Cemetery Company in 1830, which would result in the creation of Kensal Green Cemetary. Among the architects represented were Thomas Willson, who had designed the failed giant pyramid in Primrose Hill, and the Gothic Revivalist Augustus Pugin. The scheme began when the investor John Dean Paul purchased fifty-four acres of land, part of the Fillingham Estate, between the Harrow Road and the Grand Union Canal in north-west London;
he paid John Nicoll, a local landowner, the sum of £9,500 for it. At that time, Kensal Green was in the country; sheep had to be driven from their pastures for building work to proceed.

The Act of Parliament to establish a ‘General Cemetery Company for the interment of the Dead in the Neighbourhood of the Metropolis’ received Royal Assent in July 1832, at the height of an early cholera epidemic. This Act provided the template for the other private cemetery companies which would be formed over the next twenty years. It contained a vital clause providing for the compensation of Anglican clergy, who would lose out to the new cemetery on burial fees, at a rate of between 1s 6d and 5s a time, depending on the type of burial.

The General Cemetery Company published a prospectus, inviting investors to take out shares at £25 each in order to raise the £45,000 needed to build the cemetery. A violent disagreement broke out over its proposed design. This was a notorious example of the ‘Battle of the Styles’–an ongoing war of taste between Neo-classical architects such as John Nash, who was responsible for London’s elegant Regent’s Street, and the Gothic-Revival contingent.

The architectural historian John Winter has described the Battle of the Styles as the consequence of a period of architectural confusion, when the Palladian National Gallery could be built at the same time as the Houses of Parliament. At times of architectural change, the imagination can run faster than the more prosaic skills of planning and constructing a building. In the 1830s, designers wanted buildings that
looked
Gothic, but they had no real understanding of the planning and construction behind it. This dichotomy is evident in Charles Barry’s Houses of Parliament: Gothic topdressing on an essentially Classical building. (Passing the Houses of Parliament one day, Augustus Welby Pugin commented: ‘All Grecian, sir. Tudor details on a Classic body.’
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)

According to John Betjeman, ‘If you wanted to rise in your profession you would join, if you were an architect, the Gothic side in the Battle of the Styles. The influential men favoured Gothic. They
believed with Pugin that the pointed arch was the sign of Christianity, and that Gothic was the only honest style.’
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Gothic Revival was essentially a return to the building styles of the Middle Ages. Popular throughout Europe, it became a sensation in England. Early examples include Strawberry Hill (1770), Horace Walpole’s remodelled house, and Fonthill, home of the Gothic novelist William Beckford. In England, the style reached its apotheosis under Augustus Welby Pugin, whose achievements include designs for the interior of the House of Commons; MPs still gather for refreshment in the Pugin Room, with its overwhelming wallpaper. Pugin maintained that the mediaeval aesthetic, in its way of life and art, was superior to the modern and should be emulated, using authentic methods to create the same level of craftsmanship.

Although Gothic Revivalists clashed with Neo-classicists, many architects, such as Sir Charles Barry, worked in both. On a sectarian level, Gothic Revival was associated with Roman Catholicism or ‘Popery’. The Spanish Inquisition continued to strike terror into the Anglican heart. To gain some insight into the Establishment’s horror of Rome, one need only repeat the art historian Kenneth Clark’s anecdote: ‘A lady alone with Pugin in a railway carriage saw him cross himself, and cried: “You are a Catholic, sir! Guard, guard, let me out–I must get into another carriage!”’
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To resolve the dispute over the cemetery’s design, a competition was launched in November 1831. The challenge was to design a chapel on a budget of £10,000, and a gateway for £3,000. The prize was one hundred guineas (£105) for the winner. There were forty-six entries and Henry Edward Kendall (1776–1875) won first prize for his Gothic-Revival plans, uncompromisingly mediaeval and reminiscent of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. The plans included a splendid water gate, allowing coffins to be brought to the cemetery via the Grand Union Canal. However, the Board of Directors found Kendall’s designs suspiciously ‘Popish’. On a more practical level, Gothic Revival was high maintenance. The
Gentleman’s Magazine
declared the plans to be ‘…a rather florid
style of architecture. The slender proportions as well as the number of Mr Kendall’s spires and pinnacles seem to us to be at variance with the sepulchral character of the edifice.’
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The General Cemetery Company aspired to the carriage trade, the majority of whom would be Anglican, and tended to support the Classicists in the Battle of the Styles. John Griffith of Finsbury (1796–1888), was subsequently awarded the post of Chief Architect on the project for his austere Greek-Revival plans, while Carden, a Gothic enthusiast, found himself voted off the board. Griffith’s chapels, gateway and lodges were completed four years after the cemetery opened, by 1837, in a prostyle (having a row of columns in front) tetrastyle design of Portland stone and Roman cement. The Anglican Chapel is Doric, whilst the Dissenters’ Chapel is Ionic. Both have colonnades and brick catacombs with enough space for over 10,000 bodies including approximately 4,000 below the Anglican Chapel and a maximum of 1,000 below the Dissenters’ Chapel. The gateway, on the Harrow Road, is Doric, with a triumphal arch, and the Anglican chapel had the first coffin lift in Britain, invented by ‘Mr Smith, Engineer, Prince’s Street, Leicester Square’ and costing £400. As one might have expected, the
Quarterly Review
disapproved: