Necropolis: London & it's Dead (13 page)

Loudon defined the main aim of a burial ground as disposing of the dead in such a way that their decomposition would not affect the living; he advocated cheap, temporary burial grounds for the poor, which could be recycled after seven years, or using part of the workhouse grounds as a cemetery, suggestions which led contemporary writers to accuse him of ‘turning paupers into manure’.

Like Sir Christopher Wren before him, Loudon despised the concept of catacombs unless the cells were hermetically sealed:

What is this disgusting boxing up of dead bodies, as if to bid defiance of the law of nature? Surely it is pleasanter in idea, when looking on the statue of Dr Johnson in St Paul’s, to think of his remains being covered by the green turf in the open grounds of a cemetery or churchyard than to think of them lying in black
earth, saturated with putrescent moisture, under the damp paved floor of a crypt or cathedral.
²¹

Loudon’s solution to this unpleasant method of sepulchre was to tax it out of existence, rendering catacombs so expensive that the practice would be discontinued, any revenue to be spent elsewhere in the cemetery, in general upkeep and contributing to the burial of the poor. Family graves, which had to be reopened for serial interments, he disapproved of on health grounds.

A product of the Enlightenment, Loudon’s cemeteries were characteristically functional. He advocated good drainage, spacious layout with sufficient space between graves so that diggers did not cut into existing graves while excavating new ones, and calculated that 1,361 graves per acre was ideal. If one estimated deaths of the town population at 3.1 per cent per annum, this acre would suffice for a population of 1,000 for forty-five years. Graves should be at least six feet deep to allow the gases of putrefaction to escape, filtered by the soil. There should be a gated entrance and holly hedges for security. He approved of the Lamb’s Box, a device for gathering the earth from a freshly dug grave, so that the area around the mouth of the grave was not muddy, and the handcart for the funerals of the poor, considerably cheaper than a horse-drawn hearse. However, he condemned the presence of sheep in graveyards (a common solution to trimming the turf; the problem was that the sheep ate indiscriminately and nibbled young trees).

Loudon also demonstrated the ethical stance typical of the Victorian reformer. His cemeteries were not merely a place to bury the dead. They served to take on the role previously associated with churchyards and provide moral edification. Sermons in stones and spiritual uplift for the deserving poor:

…the churchyard is their book of history, their biography, their instructor in architecture and sculpture, their model of taste, and an important source of moral improvement…the greenhouse
myrtle flourishes in the parterre dedicated to affection and love; the chaste forget-me-not blooms over the ashes of a faithful friend; the green laurel shades the cenotaph of the hero; and the drooping willow, planted by the hand of the orphan, weeps over the grave of the parent.

‘Everything there is tasteful, Classical, poetical and elegant. Adorn the sepulchre, and the frightful visions which visit the midnight pillow will disappear.’
²²

By 1843, despite being wracked by rheumatism and arthritis, Loudon continued to work a punishing schedule, both as a designer and a journalist, contributing to West Norwood, Paddington and Brompton Cemeteries, and designing Birmingham Botanical Gardens and Derby Arboretum.

Ahead of his time, Loudon had taken on a commission for the first municipal cemetery in Britain, at Southampton, but it was to be his final project. A lifetime of ill-health and overwork had taken its toll. Loudon was in the final stages of lung cancer. Visiting him in Southampton, his wife ‘took one look and knew that he was dying’, and begged him to come home. But Loudon was determined to complete work on the cemetery and correct the proofs for his latest encyclopaedia, a guaranteed money-spinner. Despite Jane’s entreaties, he went on to Bath, where he inspected the site for another cemetery, although he had to be wheeled around in a Bath chair. A visit to another potential client in Oxfordshire had the landowner offering to send Loudon back to London on the train, assisted by one of his servants.

Once home, Loudon’s doctor informed him bluntly that his condition was terminal. Despite this, Loudon strove to see through all his projects, battling against the disease to complete drawings and finish manuscripts. Heavily in debt and pursued by his creditors, Loudon was anxious to provide for his family. He paced restlessly about the house, defiant to the end. One morning, as she was preparing to leave the house, Jane suddenly caught sight of a change
in his expression. Darting forward, she caught her husband before he fell over. Loudon had literally died on his feet.

It is fitting that Loudon, whose work was such an inspiration to Kensal Green, was buried there. Loudon’s grave in the ‘tasteful, Classical, poetical and elegant’ environs of Kensal Green was marked by a stylish Grecian urn. According to Jane, when the coffin was lowered into the grave, an unfamiliar man stepped forward from the crowd and threw in a few strips of ivy. He was a maker of artificial flowers, grateful that Loudon had sent him free tickets to a garden show, early in his career, when he had been too poor to attend. Never able to thank Loudon in person, this was his way of paying tribute.

Despite his publishing business and his inventions, Loudon died penniless. Jane struggled to make a living as a journalist and provide for Agnes, later a successful children’s writer. Thirteen years after Loudon went to his grave, Jane joined him.

On the Laying Out, Planting and Management of Cemeteries and the Improvement of Churchyards,
published posthumously in 1844, was to be Loudon’s true memorial.

By the time of Loudon’s death, London’s graveyards had reached such a repulsive state that there was urgent need for reform. Loudon’s lasting legacy was the contribution he made to the closure of these ‘pestiferous grounds’ and the development of the great London cemeteries.

6: GATHERINGS FROM GRAVEYARDS

The Dead are Killing the Living

By 1842, London had become the commercial capital of the world. Following the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, the population expanded from a mere one million to over two and a half million. The historian Thomas Carlyle was horrified by this city of swirling fog and thunderous noise, where coaches, carts, sheep, oxen and far too many people rushed on and on, bellowing and shrieking, as if the world had gone mad. Cobbett had dubbed the city ‘the great Wen’ (an archaic term for a boil or carbuncle); Carlyle went one better. ‘It is a monstrous wen!’ he wrote to his brother. ‘The thick smoke of it beclouds a space of thirty square miles; and a million vehicles grind along its streets forever.’
¹

As London grew, so did her trail of dead–but the capital’s 200 graveyards did not magically get any bigger. Burial was one aspect of metropolitan life which the planners had not yet confronted, even as they built the new Jerusalem. In shocking reality, London was more necropolis than metropolis, her bustling thoroughfares and sophisticated highways paved with gold for the fortunate few, her side-streets reeking of decay. By 1842, the life expectancy of a professional man was thirty. For a labourer, it was just seventeen. The burgeoning pop
ulation, drawn to the city for employment, was rocked by a series of epidemics. The high infant death-rate and constant epidemics of cholera, typhoid, measles and smallpox meant that death was always present. No wonder that, according to historian Vanessa Harding, Londoners spent three million pounds a year on gin!

However, 1842 was a significant year, as it finally saw the Government recognize the scale of the problem of what to do with the dead. A Select Committee was appointed to investigate the capital’s noxious and overcrowded burial grounds, but this only came about after a series of scandals, a wave of cholera epidemics and a long campaign by public health reformers Sir Edwin Chadwick and George Alfred Walker. Chadwick, a barrister and radical journalist, and Walker, an eminent surgeon, were pioneers who battled long and hard to improve the parlous state of things.

Graves were being crowded out by developers. City churches, with their old-world churchyards, were wedged in between huge modern office blocks, public buildings and railway stations. In a city where building land was at a premium, London was faced with a lack of burial space. Sir Edwin Chadwick, whose
Sanitary Report
proved to be a bestseller for the Stationery Office in 1842, confirmed that, every year, 20,000 adults and 30,000 youths and children were ‘imperfectly interred’ in less than 218 acres of burial ground, ‘closely surrounded by the abodes of the living’.
²

Available burial grounds fell into three categories: existing churches with their churchyards, stand-alone churchyards, and new developments. The satirical magazine
Punch
, at that period closer in spirit to today’s
Private Eye,
editorialized that: ‘A London churchyard is very like a London omnibus. It can be made to carry any number.’
³
St Mary’s Churchyard, Islington, for example, was notoriously overcrowded. In 1835, Thomas Cromwell wrote that conditions were so bad it was necessary to remove the oldest tombstones to make way for the new. An engraving by Daniel Warner dating from the 1840s depicts it as jam-packed with looming mausolea rammed in among gravestones leaning at precarious angles.
⁴

Despite the reservations of Wren, Vanbrugh and their successors, burial in vaults beneath churches had continued. The processes of decomposition, shaky foundations and the British disease of rising damp caused particular difficulties. Chadwick noted that, however solid the coffin, ‘Sooner or later every corpse buried in the vault of a church spreads the products of decomposition through the air which is breathed, as readily as if it had never been enclosed.’

One example was the Rector’s Vault beneath St Clement Dane’s Church on the Strand, the entrance into which was in the aisle of the church, near the Communion table. When opened, the smell of decomposing flesh was so intense that lighted candles, passed through the opening into the vault, were instantly extinguished. Workmen were understandably reluctant to descend into the vault until it had been aired for two or three days.

One of the duties of a sexton consisted of ‘tapping’ coffins, ‘so as to facilitate the escape of gases which would otherwise detonate from their confinement’.
⁵
On occasion, the build-up of corpse gas was so intense that coffins actually exploded. In the 1800s, fires beneath St Clement Dane’s and Wren’s Church of St James’s in Jermyn Street destroyed many bodies and burned for days.

As well as fire, water was another problem. There had been a well to the east of St Clement Dane’s, sunk in 1807, but the water became so offensive, probably as result of the infiltration of the products of human putrefaction, that it was bricked up. The water table had risen, with springs so close to the surface that coffins sank into a watery grave as soon as they were let down.

Churchyards where the churches had been destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666 but had never been rebuilt were used as burial grounds for the amalgamated parishes. But here, conditions were no better. The churchyards, the majority of which were controlled by the Church of England, were not big enough to cope with the number of dead. St Georges-in-the-East had three acres for a population of 40,000; St Matthew’s, Bethnal Green, two acres for more
than 70,000; St Mary’s, Whitechapel, had under an acre for nearly 35,000 people.

Existing burial grounds included Cross Bones, an unconsecrated graveyard near Borough High Street, traditionally used for prostitutes, who were forbidden Christian burial. By the nineteenth century, Cross Bones was in the middle of one of the worst slums in London, choked with cholera victims–and a favourite with body-snatchers.

In addition to existing burial grounds, new ones were founded as speculative ventures by entrepreneurs. These were either attached to existing churches and chapels, or created on plots purchased by developers. There were fourteen of these by 1835, including Spa Fields, Clerkenwell, which had started life as a tea-rooms but was then converted to the rather more profitable purpose of human burial; New Bunhill Fields, Islington; Victoria Park Cemetery, Bethnal Green at Cambridge Fields (five acres); and Sheen’s New Ground in Whitechapel (two acres). With the exception of the strictly-controlled Quaker and Jewish cemeteries, all these burial grounds were horribly congested. Charges for burial were cheaper than in churchyards, although services were not always conducted by ministers of religion. At Butler’s Burial Ground in south London, the gravedigger donned a surplice to read the burial service; at Globe Fields in Mile End, proceedings were conducted by an ex-cobbler.
⁶

George Alfred Walker carried out a shocking survey of forty-seven overcrowded London burial grounds. In
Gatherings from Graveyards
(1839) ‘Walker of the Graveyards’ confessed himself astonished that ‘London, with its thousands of busy minds and observant eyes, anxiously exploring the dimly shadowed outlines of the future, should bear upon its breast these plague spots, the burial grounds.’
⁷
Walker believed that dead bodies actually
caused
disease–attributing outbreaks of typhus and cholera directly to them.

One of the most obscene examples chronicled by Walker was the site at Portugal Street, situated on St Clement’s Lane, off the Strand,
and otherwise known as the ‘Green Ground’, although there was not a tree to be seen. ‘It was a mass of putrefaction.’ A ‘burying place beyond memory of man’, Portugal Street constituted a burial ground for a nearby workhouse, which was demolished to make way for King’s College Hospital in the 1830s. Several slaughterhouses in the vicinity contributed to the stench of decay. Upwards of 5,500 bodies were interred there between 1823 and 1848.