Pound-wise England : Art and Epitaphs: A Tour of London Cemeteries

This is a city that celebrates the dead. Proud of her departed poets, kings and villains, she has memorialized them not only in Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s Cathedral, but in more than 100 cemeteries around the city. In them, you can visit everyone from William Blake and Anna Pavlova to Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, and at the same time discover wonderful Victorian sculpture and epitaphs.

The logical place to start a tour is right in the heart of the city, at Bunhill Fields. During the Great Plague of 1665-66, more than 5,000 bodies were tossed weekly into a pit here; the name Bunhill is thought to be a variation of bone hill .

Parts of the cemetery grounds were never consecrated by the Anglican Church, allowing religious dissenters (non-Anglicans) to be buried there. Thus came Isaac Watts, lyricist of such hymns as “O God, Our Help in Ages Past” and “Joy to the World”; John Bunyan, author of “Pilgrim’s Progress”; poet-mystic William Blake, and Daniel Defoe, creator of “Robinson Crusoe.”

One highlight is the sarcophagus of a true martyr, Dame Mary Page, who in five years, according to the marker on her tomb, “was tap’d 66 times, had taken away 240 gallons of water without ever repining at her case or ever fearing the operation.” At about 3.6 gallons per surgical draining, she would have been a valuable natural resource in a drought year.

Near her are Susannah Wesley, mother of the Methodist reformers, John and Charles; John Lettsom, a Quaker physician who introduced the mangel-wurzel, a variety of large beet used as cattle food, to England, and Henry Fauntleroy, a banker who embezzled 250,000 from his bank, spent it in riotous living and was executed at London’s Newgate Prison.

(To reach Bunhill Fields, take the Northern Line of the Underground to the Old Street stop, then walk down City Street . )

By the 19th Century, the alternatives to an unconsecrated cemetery, Anglican churches and churchyards had become dangerously overcrowded and malodorous.

Charles Dickens complained that “rot and mildew and dead citizens formed the uppermost scent” in the city. But it took the city’s first cholera epidemic, in January of 1832, to overcome resistance on the part of Anglicans to burials in other than church-owned plots. Kensal Green Cemetery was licensed by an Act of Parliament that year as a privately owned cemetery where both Anglicans and non-Anglicans could be buried.

Fifty-six acres of former sheep pasture in northern London, Kensal Green was greeted enthusiastically by Londoners who quickly erected huge mausoleums to themselves--while still alive to enjoy them.

Every motif can be found on that of circus owner Andrew Ducrow, a memorial that cost 3,000 in 1837. It has a beehive carved in the stone roof, broken columns entwined with roses and wreaths, angels, maidens and an Egyptian sphinx. The inscription notes modestly: “This tomb erected by genius for the reception of its own remains.” Nearby, that of a patent medicine king points out: “He is now at rest and far beyond the praises or censures of this world. Stranger . . . read the name of John St. John Long without comment.”

Kensal Green later became a literary enclave, and the final resting place of William Makepeace Thackeray, author of “Vanity Fair”; Wilkie Collins, whose best known book was “The Moonstone,” and Anthony Trollope, who wrote 48 novels, including “Barchester Towers,” as well as poets Leigh Hunt and Thomas Hood.

(Take the Bakerloo Line to the Kensal Green stop, then walk left along Harrow Road).

Highgate Cemetery, which opened in 1839 north of Kensal Green, was romantic from the start. There was London Observer owner and financier Julius Beer and his eccentric family; the poetic Rossettis, given to opium suicides and midnight exhumations, and later, avowed lesbians Mabel Veronica Batten and Radclyffe Hall, author of “The Well of Loneliness,” which was banned in England in 1928 for its scandalous content.

They were joined--before the western part of Highgate was closed off after it became overgrown and dangerous--by scientists Michael Faraday, inventor of the first generator, and Jacob Bronowski, who wrote the book “The Ascent of Man.” The west cemetery was reopened several years ago and can be visited on daily tours conducted by the Friends of Highgate. Ask to see the wonderful lion, Nero, on the tomb of animal showman George Wombwell, and the stone dog, Lion, of bare-knuckle fighter Thomas Sayers.

The east side, though less picturesque, can be visited unaccompanied. Here the most popular monument is the dark cast-metal head of Karl Marx. Flowers in all shades of red are left at the tomb. Across from Marx rest “Middlemarch” author George Eliot with her paramour, George Henry Lewes, and philosophers Herbert Spencer and George Holyoake. Actor Ralph Richardson’s plain grave, the stone piano of concert pianist Harry Thornton and the granite violin of a man named Thomas Nighy are also in the east cemetery.

(Take the Northern Line to the Archway stop, then find Swain’s Lane and walk downhill).

The profusion of sculpture found in London cemeteries is often credited to Queen Victoria. After the death of Prince Albert, her beloved husband, in 1861, she led England in elaborate mourning rituals, but funerary art was already well-established. The most popular symbols were lambs for children, broken columns for those cut off in their prime, and sheaves of wheat designating family members who had been harvested at a ripe old age.

Brompton Cemetery, established in 1840 in southwest London, is a wonderful place to find Victorian-era vignettes. Queen Victoria’s own pediatrician, Thomas Pettigrew, is interred here, along with Dr. John Snow, who put Victoria “under” for the births of her last two children.

There are the usual number of wistful maidens in classical dress, and curiosities such as the stone children standing guard over Maj. Ronald Erne. The famous here include suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, noted tenor Richard Tauber and the museum-quality arts and crafts movement chest tomb (an above-ground tomb shaped like a house with legs) created by painter Edward Burne-Jones for arts patron Frederick Leyland.

Also worth a look is the bas-relief of a zeppelin being shot down by a tiny airplane on the monument of World War I Flight Sub-lieutenant Reginald Alexander John Warneford, who died in the encounter depicted.

(Take the District Line to the West Brompton stop. The cemetery is to your right on Old Brompton Road.)

Established in 1876, Hampstead Cemetery is off the beaten path in northwest London, but worth the trip. Here you will find a stone pipe organ complete with music, and the beautiful bronze statue of Marthe John, created by her husband, sculptor Sir William Goscombe John.

There are interesting minor characters buried here, such as Horace Short, who died in 1917 but before that was captured by cannibals in the South Sea islands and later worshiped as their king.

And there are the better known: scientist Joseph Lister (who introduced antiseptic surgery) and inventor Sebastian de Ferranti, illustrator Kate Greenaway, actresses Dame Gladys Cooper and Marie Lloyd, and French horn player Dennis Brain.

(Take the Metropolitan or Jubilee Line to the Finchley Road stop, and the bus along Finchley to its junction with Fortune Green Road. Follow Fortune Green Road half a block to the cemetery.)

Strictly speaking, Golders Green, slightly north of Hampstead, is a crematory and memorial park in which rose bushes commemorate many residents, including actor Peter Sellers, composer Ivor Novello and singer Kathleen Ferrier.

Except for an intriguing bronze sculpture titled “Into the Silent Land,” which shows a young girl being lifted away by a mysterious hooded figure, and a statue of Indian philanthropist Ghanshyamdas Birla, Golders Green is a magnificent English garden.

Inside the Ernest George Crematorium, the ashes of Anna Pavlova are behind glass in a container draped by her pink ballet shoes, and those of Sigmund Freud are in another room in one of the Grecian urns he loved. To get into the crematorium, ask for a key at the nearby office. The smaller building next door has the remains of “Dracula” author Bram Stoker.

(Take the Northern Line to the Golders Green stop. Turn right on Finchley Road and, after several blocks, right again on Hoop Road.)

A list of English cemeteries that did not include explorer Richard Burton’s stone tent would be like a fine dinner with no wine. Yet it is not easy to find.

You must make your way to the western suburb of Mortlake, then locate the Catholic church, St. Mary Magdalene, just off Mortlake High Street. Burton’s wife, Isabel, unable to get him into Westminster Abbey, erected this tent instead, a monument to adventure, foreign lands and a life lived on the fringe.

Measuring 12 feet square and 18 feet high, it has a frieze of Islamic crescents and stars. You can climb a ladder in the back and look through the glass at two coffins (Isabel died in 1896, six years after her husband), a painting of a crucifix and some brass ornaments.

All of these cemeteries are open daily and welcome visitors. Unlike the graveyards in some other places, the monuments here may be freely photographed. The city that commemorates death is anxious for everyone to join in the celebration.