Necropolis: London & it's Dead (12 page)

Wren’s proposals for suburban cemeteries may have been rejected by the Corporation of London but, towards the end of the eighteenth century, planners in other capitals came to appreciate the hygienic and aesthetic possibilities of interring the dead on the outskirts of the city. Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, founded by Napoleon in 1804, offered a magnificent example. Napoleon was the first leader to address the problems of the Paris cemeteries. Previously, burial had taken place in parish churchyards but, as the population soared, these had become full to overflowing and constituted a health hazard. The chief cemetery, Les Saint-Innocents, near Les Halles, was destroyed, and the bones transported to the catacombs, a series of deserted quarries underneath Paris.

The land, purchased by the urban planner Nicholas Frochot on Napoleon’s orders in 1803, was originally a hill of the Champ l’Evêque, where a rich merchant built a house in 1430. Subsequently, Louis XIV named it after his confessor and the land was given to the Jesuits, who converted it into a hospice. The Jesuits sold the land in 1763 to pay off debts. Frochot’s coup was to persuade the authorities to rebury the remains of Molière, La Fontaine, Abélard and Héloïse in the new cemetery–which soon led to Père Lachaise being the ultimate burial place for the rich and famous. As the social commentator Laman Blanchard observed in 1842, the Parisian man of wealth possessed a town house, a country house, a box at the Opera and a tomb in Père Lachaise.

Architect Théodore Brongniart, who also designed the Paris Stock Exchange, sought to emulate English garden designers such as Capability Brown, whose naturalistic landscapes were actually highly contrived: small hills were constructed, lakes sunk, trees planted at strategic locations. Although the style borrows from the English tradition, the result is quintessentially French. Père Lachaise is laid out like Central Paris itself, all avenues and boulevards rotating like spokes off a wheel from a series of significant architectural features, such as the massive rotunda to Casimir Perier (a disgraced politician) and the Bartholomé war memorial. The influences are formal and Classical, and the French culture of presentation is manifest. Along the Avenue de la Chapelle the majestic horse-chestnut trees are systematically pollarded to geometric exactitude. With its great and good, its eccentrics and mavericks, its war memorials and its important bourgeoisie, Père Lachaise is more like a small town than a garden. The little mausolea, with their narrow windows trimmed by ornamental grilles and their forbidding panelled doors, resemble apartment houses, inspiring one small child, when visiting, to ask his parents: ‘Who lives here?’ There are no weeds, or trailing growths of wild flowers and the planting is rigorous and schematic, more
haute couture
than the natural look.

In Edinburgh, Scottish architects also attempted to solve the problem of what to do with the dead. Carlton Hill Cemetery, which dates back to 1792, is situated on a hill 100 metres high, with panoramic views of Edinburgh, Holyrood, Arthur’s Seat and the Firth of Forth. William Henry Playfair was commissioned to design a National Monument to honour the Scots killed in the Napoleonic Wars and, in keeping with the fashion for Classical architecture that characterized the Enlightenment, he came up with an impressive recreation of the Athens Parthenon, entirely fitting for ‘the Athens of the North’. Building work commenced in 1822, then the money ran out. Just twelve columns stand today, towering over the city.

Over in Glasgow, John Strang developed the Glasgow
Necropolis. Opened in 1832, on a hillside like its predecessors, the Necropolis was designed to be non-denominational. It soon became like Westminster Abbey, supplying the final resting-place of Glasgow worthies from the 1830s to the 1870s.

The trend towards rural cemeteries spread to America. In Boston, New England, the authorities faced similar problems of overcrowded burial grounds. One difference was that in America, developers were free to build straight over graveyards, driven to do so by an ever-burgeoning population. Epidemics brought many burial grounds to the same pestiferous condition as their British counterparts, which led to the trend to bury out of town. There was another dimension: rapid urban growth, population mobility, booming business and commercial ventures, aggregations of surplus wealth, concentrations of educated and public-spirited people, revisions of religious doctrines and Romantic affectation–all combined to create a context in which the rural cemetery was a logical alternative to the burial places of an earlier era. Rural cemetery promoters wanted to change the image of the disgusting burial grounds of the past, and create peaceful retreats.

Established in 1831, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Mount Auburn Cemetery was the first rural cemetery in America, and it set an example to the rest of America and to Europe, too. Landscape gardeners planned its layout around the natural contours of the site, with lazily meandering roads winding round already established tall shady trees. Mount Auburn became a sanctuary where mourners could commune with nature and their dead were buried with dignity within its spacious acres. It became such a popular destination that it led directly to the development of public parks. The City Fathers, somewhat perturbed to find citizens walking dogs and riding horses among the graves, agitated for more green spaces where the populace could promenade on sunny afternoons.
¹⁸

Meanwhile, back in London, Victorian planners dreamed up bizarre and fantastic schemes to deal with the city’s dead.

The influence of Père Lachaise was deeply felt. Architect Francis
Goodwin, responding to ‘the prevention of the danger and inconvenience of burying the dead within the metropolis’ designed a massive, 150-acre Neo-classical cemetery to be situated in north London, in Primrose Hill, or in south London, near Shooter’s Hill. The plans included a 42-acre special section, a sort of British pantheon for ‘the very wealthy and great and distinguished persons whose wisdom, bravery, genius and talent have conspicuously contributed to the glory of the county’. Enclosed by a double cloister through which visitors could promenade in wet weather, it featured facsimiles of the Temple of the Vestal Virgins at the Roman Forum and the Athenian Acropolis. Four figures, representing the Tower of the Winds in Athens were to stand at each corner of the cloister. There was to be a replica of Trajan’s Column, the 30-metre-high monument to the Roman Emperor, dating from the first century
AD
, and catacombs. Outside this inner sanctum a secondary area, laid out like Père Lachaise, would cater for the middle classes, with the ‘humbler class’ of folk situated at a remove. Investors willing to buy into this grandiose proposal were offered 16,000 shares at £25 each.

Thomas Willson proposed a huge pyramid for Primrose Hill. At an estimated cost of £2,500, this massive mausoleum, higher than St Paul’s, would contain five million Londoners. It was designed as an investment, with investors invited to apply for the ‘Five Per Cent Pyramid Stock’ in the Pyramid General Cemetery Company. The catacombs would be rented to parishes or individual families at £50 per vault. More than 40,000 bodies would be buried each year. A final profit was anticipated of £10,764,800.

Constructed from brick, with granite facing, the plans comprised a chapel, office, quarters for the Keeper, Clerk, Sexton and Superintendent, four entrances and a central ventilation shaft. A series of sloping paths would allow bodies to be moved. Each catacomb took up to twenty-four coffins and could be sealed up after all interments had been completed. Resembling a beehive, it would be a thing of awe and wonder to all who saw it:

To trace the length of its shadow at sunrise and at eve and to toil up its singular passages to the summit will beguile the hours of the curious and impress feelings of solemn awe and admiration upon every beholder…a coup d’oeil of sepulchral magnificence unequalled in the world…the graceful proportions are particularly adapted to sepulchral solemnity.
¹⁹

The pyramid never left the drawing board but, undeterred, Thomas Willson went on to join the Board of the General Cemetery Company, responsible for Kensal Green, the first of London’s magnificent nineteenth-century cemeteries.

The greatest British influence on the development of Kensal Green, and its successors, has been largely forgotten. It is to John Claudius Loudon
²⁰
that we owe the London cemeteries and the impressive arboretums and botanical gardens which characterize our cities. Loudon (1783–1843) was a horticultural writer and designer who campaigned vigorously for burial reform; he suggested that the cemeteries of the past would become the parks of the future and predicted the development of cremation, forty years before it became legal in Britain.

Born in South Lanarkshire, Loudon was a polymath with a taste for horticulture. From his earliest years, he enjoyed laying out plots in the little garden his father had put aside for him, and when a relative brought tamarinds home from a missionary expedition, Loudon was happy to donate the fruit to his peers, as long as he got to keep the seeds. Although Loudon was destined for the Church, his father sympathized with his passion for plants and arranged for him to study with a landscape gardener from the age of fourteen. By the time Loudon arrived in London in 1803, armed with letters of introduction to some of the richest landowners in England, his reputation preceded him.

Determined, energetic and enthusiastic, Loudon opened a practice as a landscape architect at 4 Chapel Street, Bedford Row and made his mark upon the city at once, and for ever. Writing in
The Literary Journal
about the gloomy nature of London’s garden squares, he suggested planting plane trees, sycamores and almonds, which would stand up to the city’s sooty atmosphere but counteract the existing funereal pines and firs. At a stroke of the pen, Loudon changed the city’s appearance for ever–London without its spring blossom and distinctive plane trees is unimaginable.

The young man also worked on commissions in his native Scotland, including Brunswick House for the Duchess of Brunswick and Scone Palace in Perthshire for Lord Mansfield. Loudon’s father moved south to join his son and took on Wood Hall Farm in Berkshire, where he successfully transplanted Scottish agricultural techniques; this led to Loudon Junior establishing one of the first agricultural colleges, at Great Tew. Both Loudons excelled in their careers, although they became victims of an extraordinary form of early nineteenth-century racism. ‘North Britons’, as these Scots were called, were bitterly resented in England for their professionalism, ambition and gritty determination.

Although literally crippled with arthritis–Loudon developed a limp in his twenties–he set out on ‘The Grand Tour’, the sightseeing trip to Europe and the Near East which marked a rite of passage for the young gentlemen of the era. Loudon was determined to visit the ruins of Classical Antiquity that had inspired Inigo Jones, Capability Brown and other landscape architects.

Europe in 1813 was still reeling from the effects of the Napoleonic wars. Arriving in Konigsberg, the former capital of East Prussia, Loudon found traces of war everywhere. The fields were littered with dead horses, their bones whitening in the sun; roads were broken up, houses in ruins. Refugee columns, possessions piled into carts, passed Loudon less than two miles from the marauding French army. Near Marienburg and Danzig, he encountered 2,000 Russian troops, who looked more like convicts than soldiers. By the time Loudon reached Berlin, he saw the long avenues of linden trees crowded with carriages and wagons, as
people streamed into the city for protection, an extraordinary vision in the moonlight.

Travelling in Russia, Loudon was arrested as a spy when he paused to make architectural drawings in Riga, and had the bizarre experience of hearing his notebook read out in court, although the local magistrates could make head nor tale of his jottings and much was lost in translation. On the trip to Moscow, he fared little better. The roads were almost impassable, and on one occasion, when his carriage ran into a snowdrift, the coachmen unharnessed the horses and trotted away, leaving Loudon and his companions to the wolves, an experience which he endured with customary sangfroid. By the time Loudon got to Moscow, eager to sketch the grand designs, he found the houses black from a great fire, and the streets filled with the ruins of churches and aristocratic mansions. Instead of seeing the great palaces and gardens at first hand, he found only destruction and decay.

Loudon was a prolific author, in the magazine format which characterized Victorian publishing. Month after month he edited four periodicals and wrote encyclopaedias on gardening and agriculture. A workaholic with an iron constitution, he survived on four hours’ sleep a night and copious cups of black coffee.

Not content with landscape gardening and journalism, Loudon developed an iron-glazing bar that made curved glazing possible in 1816 and built a prototype hothouse that influenced the great Paxton in his creations at Chatsworth and Crystal Palace. In 1826, wracked by rheumatism and arthritis, Loudon endured the amputation of his right shoulder after a botched operation to correct a broken arm and became addicted to the laudanum he was taking for the pain. But even this could not hold him back. Loudon learned to write and draw with his left hand, and hired a draughtsman to lay out his plans. Meanwhile, his opium habit was getting out of control; he was downing a wine-glass full of the drug every eight hours. Anxious to change this, he devised a characteristically ingenious solution, adding a wine-glass of water to his two-pint bottle of
laudanum every time he took a wine-glass out. Diluted in this fashion, the mixture became gradually weaker every day, until Loudon had weaned himself off the drug.

In the same year, looking for a diversion from ill-health and overwork, Loudon reviewed a three-volume romance entitled
The Mummy’s Tale–A Novel
, for
The Gardener’s
magazine. Set in 2126, in an England that had reverted to absolute monarchy, this featured prototypes for espresso machines, air-conditioning and, most prophetically, ‘a communication system that permitted instant world dissemination of news’. Intrigued, Loudon invited the anonymous author to lunch. To his astonishment, this early proponent of science fiction was a young woman of twenty-three, one Jane Webb. Left penniless at seventeen by her father’s death, she had turned to writing as a means of support. Jane rapidly became Loudon’s editor, wife, and mother of their only child, Agnes. With the arrival of Agnes, the Loudons’ finances, always troubled, became desperate. Abandoning science fiction for the more remunerative genre of journalism, Jane developed into a successful author in her own right with a series of books designed to interest ‘ladies’ in gardening.