Necropolis: London & it's Dead (24 page)

Inevitably, the final remains of many Londoners went into the latest foundations of their great city. Labourers at Borough, SE1, incorporated the remains of the ‘repulsive’ Ewer Street burial ground into the foundations of a railway viaduct in 1840. At St Pancras, following legislation in 1864, the Midland Railway Company acquired part of the old St Pancras churchyard in order to build a tunnel connecting the line with King’s Cross, digging a trench right across the churchyard, from which ten to fifteen thousand bodies were removed. These were reinterred in the new St Pancras Cemetery, opened in 1854 on eighty-eight acres of Horse Shoe Farm on Finchley Common. In 1877, another ninety-four acres were added, and it became the St Pancras & Islington Cemetery, the largest in London at the time.

However, the bodies faced further disruption: in 2004, over 5,000 graves had to be reopened during the construction of the Channel
Tunnel rail link. The coffins, including those of French émigrés the Archbishop of Narbonne and the Bishop of Avranches, provided fascinating research opportunities for archaeologists. All were later respectfully reinterred in a series of burial services conducted by the Bishop of Edmonton.
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A few burial grounds became builders’ yards, with the headstones flattened and obliterated by a constant succession of carthorses. New Bunhill Fields, near New Kent Road, was converted into a timberyard, with the Chapel used as a sawmill. The City of London Ground, in Golden Lane, became the location of a carrier’s cart business. At Gibraltar Walk burial ground, Bethnal Green Road, small slices of land were cut off and doled out as yards for the surrounding houses, while the burial ground itself became a neglected jungle, forming a private garden for the big house which opened on to it, where the owner of the ground lived.
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Charles Dickens relished the gothic appeal of these neglected burial grounds. In ‘The City of Absent’ which appears in
The Uncommercial Traveller
, he tells us that:

Such strange churchyards hide in the City of London; churchyards sometimes so entirely detached from churches, always so pressed upon by houses; so small, so rank, so silent, so forgotten, except by the few people who look down into them from their smoky windows. As I stand peeping in through the iron gates and rails, I can peel the rusty metal off, like bark from an old tree. The illegible tombstones are all lop-sided, the grave-mounds lost their shape in the rains of a hundred years ago, the Lombardy Poplar or Plane-Tree that was once a drysalter’s daughter and several common-councilmen, has withered like those worthies, and its departed leaves are dust beneath it. Contagion of slow ruin overhangs the place.
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These closed churchyards remained useless and dreary. Nobody went into them, and children gazed through the railings, while
their parents used them as a tip. In 1878, the Rev. H. R. Hawies told his congregation at St James’s, Westmoreland Street, that in a swift walk through their own parish burial ground, in Paddington Street, Marylebone, he had encountered: ‘Orange peel, rotten eggs, cast-off hair plaits, oyster-shells, crockery, newspapers with bread and meat, twelve old kettles, two coal-scuttles, three old hats and an umbrella, eleven dead cats and five live ones!’
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The burial grounds had become grim and depressing places, and nobody wanted to venture inside. Back in 1843, Sir Edwin Chadwick had recommended that the space previously occupied by burial grounds should be made available for public use, and his sentiments were echoed now by other reformers, who suggested that they be reopened as parks.

An early example of this change of use was Bunhill Fields, closed in 1832 and re-opened with considerable ceremony in October 1869 as ‘a public walk’. The
Illustrated London News
reported that ‘this ancient City burial-place, laid out ornamentally and planted with trees and flowers, was formally reopened by the Lord Mayor of London on Thursday week’. Hundreds of well-dressed people, admitted on a ticket-only basis, greeted the Earl of Shaftsbury, the Rector of Bishopsgate and members of the Preservation Committee when they arrived at the ground. Charles Reed MP, Chairman of the Bunhill Fields Preservation Committee, reminded the crowd of the cemetery’s long history and its famous residents:

Not the ‘rude forefathers’ are buried here, but the founders of families, the pious and learned pastors and teachers of every religious community, not divines alone but men distinguished in literature, science and art, whose names are household words in every clime; John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe and Isaac Watts are the property not of any nation but of all mankind.
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The preservation work, one of the first instances of cemetery restoration in London, was painstaking. Not a fragment of stone
was taken away, or soil removed. Tombs had been raised, headstones set straight, illegible inscriptions deciphered and recut, hundreds of decayed tombs restored, paths laid and avenues planted. The committee saw their task as a sacred trust: ‘Trimming, as it were, the beacon-light left to warn future generations to defend their religion, even unto their blood.’

Today, Bunhill Fields seems a gloomy place, with its iron railings and dripping trees. It is one of the last surviving inner-city burial grounds in London, and gives some indication of what these places must have been like in Dickens’s day. With its vivid moss and green paintwork, Bunhill has an unearthly quality. It is obvious why it became a ‘public walk’, with one path leading straight through. The headstones are so close together it would be impossible to squeeze between them, even if they were not corralled by railings. These stones are as plain and unadorned as one would expect among Dissenters, with the occasional anthropoid grave (shaped like a mummy case) or pyramid.

The household names buried here, Bunyan, Defoe and William Blake, are giants of literature, representing three aspects of English writing. Bunyan and Defoe were both Dissidents, both imprisoned, although Defoe for his debts rather than his opinions. Bunyan’s tomb was restored in 1862 by private subscription, a piece of the original stone now being in the Congregational Church at Highgate. The monument to Defoe was raised in 1870 by a subscription in the
Christian World
. William Blake, perhaps the most eccentric of this great trio, lies here with his wife, Catherine.

In 1882, the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association was founded, influencing public opinion on open spaces in London over the next twelve years. By the end of 1895, the Association had carried through over three hundred and twenty successful transformations, with another sixty in hand, under the auspices of the energetic Lord Brabazon, Earl of Meath, philanthropist and campaigner for London’s green belt. The Association’s activities led to new Acts of Parliament, such as the Disused Burial Grounds Act.
Clauses were inserted in the Open Spaces Acts, and several Bills threatening public spaces were opposed and extinguished. In another development, the Association secured the opening on Saturdays of over two hundred school recreation grounds, ensuring that children had a safe place to play at weekends.

The success of the Association was directly attributable to the efforts of Mrs Isabella Holmes, who was employed as a ‘scout’. Like her namesake Sherlock Holmes, Mrs Holmes was a detective and an indefatigable researcher: she visited every disused burial ground in London. She was filled with a reforming zeal, believing that turning graveyards into gardens preserved them as public spaces in an overcrowded metropolis where even the poorest parts of Whitechapel were valued at over £30,000 per acre in the 1880s.

‘There could be no better way of securing the preservation of a burial ground from encroachment or misuse, than by laying it out and handing it over to a public body to be maintained for the benefit of the public,’ Holmes declared. ‘Once given to the people, the people are not likely to give up an inch of it again without a struggle.’
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Holmes was cunning, versatile, and ready for anything. Armed with old maps of London gleaned from the British Museum, she set forth to document every burying ground in the capital. Shy at first, Holmes quickly gained confidence in her curious task, knocking on the doors of private houses and asking if she could look down into a nearby graveyard from one of the upper windows. This was not always successful. Anxious to see what had become of Butler’s burial ground at Coxon’s Place, Horsleydown, she followed directions to two small yards. One was a hooper’s yard, full of barrels. The other a builder’s, with
BEWARE OF THE DOG
on the gate. Doubtful of the existence of this dog, Mrs Holmes pushed open the gate: ‘but he was there, in full vigour, and I speedily fled.’
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On another occasion, she was pelted with mud in Cable Street.

Occasionally, contractors refused to admit that their yards had once been burial places–but Holmes could see why. Builder’s merchants were anxious about the planning consequences. What if they
wanted to put up a wall or build a shed, only to find they were thwarted by the enforcement of the Disused Burial Grounds Act of 1884, as amended by the Open Spaces Act of 1887? Mrs Holmes was not to be deterred. And she also learned the investigative journalist’s tricks of the trade:

If one asks to go into a burial ground, it is generally imagined that one wants to see a particular grave. I have been supposed to have ‘some-one lyin’ there’ in all quarters of the metropolis, and in all sorts of funny little places. I have been hailed as a sister by the quietest of Quakeresses and the darkest of bewigged Jewesses, by the leanest and most clean-shaven of ritualistic Priests, and by the bearded and buxom Dissenter.
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But Holmes’s efforts were rewarded. The Metropolitan Public Gardens Association was a popular cause. In 1894, with a smiling face and sinking heart, the Earl of Meath made a speech to the Mansion House Fund for the Employment of the Unemployed, asking for a donation. He said that if they could find enough labourers, the money would be used in wages. To his astonishment, the Mansion House Fund donated over £11,000. This generosity constituted an emergency for Holmes, who was called to the Association’s Lancaster Gate headquarters and asked for a list of projects. Within a few weeks, ‘hundreds of men were employed, and their food arranged for into the bargain’.
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By 1896, there were over ninety burial grounds within the metropolitan area dedicated to the public as recreation grounds. To people who remembered those places before they were converted, the transformation was wonderful.

A change in the climate of public opinion meant that newly appointed clergymen were writing off to the Association begging them to take over their churchyards. The new Rector of Bethnal Green not only asked for the Association’s help in laying out his churchyard, he made a Christmas present of it to the vestry!

Mrs Holmes was adamant that this was the most appropriate use of the land. The burial grounds were there, in the middle of London, ‘whether we like them or no, and they become far more wholesome when fresh soil is imported, good gravel paths made, and the ground drained, and when grass, flowers, trees and shrubs take the place of rotting rubbish.’
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To those who criticized the Association for lack of reverence, Holmes retorted that anyone with an interest in particular tombstones had the right to stop them being moved, and that, in theory, inscriptions and positions should be recorded by the Registrar of the Diocese. In practice, once the Association had taken over many of these closed burial grounds, they found evidence of neglect. Tombstones had become illegible over the years, and no family members stepped forward to claim them. In some grounds, such as Spa Fields, not a single gravestone existed when it came into the hands of the Association.
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Spa Fields, formerly a horrific exhibit in George Walker’s evidence to the Select Committee in 1842, was purchased from the Marquis of Northampton in 1885. The latter handed it over at a nominal rate for the purpose of a children’s playground and added another half acre. The Association drained it and filled it with soil and gravel. A sepia photograph from 1897 shows a view of the swings, with the parish mortuary in the background, ‘the presence of which does not seem to have any sobering effect on the children’.
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Two little girls in white aprons sit on the swings; a toddler stands nearby in a tightly buttoned coat that echoes the uniform of the caretaker, in his smart peaked cap. Visiting the playground, Holmes observed that:

A playground such as Spa Fields is about as different from an ordinary village green, where country boys and girls romp and shout, as two things with the same purpose can be. But it is only necessary to have once seen the joy with which the children of our crowded cities hail the formation of such a playground, and
the use to which they put it, to be convinced that the trouble of acquiring it, or the cost of laying it out, is amply repaid…And can the dead beneath the soil object to the little feet above them? I am sure they cannot…Such a space as Spa Fields may never have been consecrated for the use of the dead, but perchance the omission is in part redeemed by its dedication to the living.
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Another of the Association’s achievements was to rescue the stinking burial ground of Russell Court, Drury Lane–featured in Dickens’s novel
Bleak House
–which had become little more than a heap of decaying rubbish thrown from surrounding houses. The carcases of eighteen cats were removed immediately. By 1896, the houses had gone, and the graveyard had become an asphalted recreation ground, with children playing on the swings. Only the old iron gate, where tragic Lady Dedlock’s life was brought to a close, remained.
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