Victorian Cemeteries and the Suburbs of London

Spatial Consequences to the Reordering of London's Burials in the Early 19th Century

Gian Luca Amadei

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000521511
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Planificación urbana y paisajismo

This book explores how Victorian cemeteries were the direct result of the socio-cultural, economic and political context of the city, and were part of a unique transformation process that emerged in London at the time. The book shows how the re-ordering of the city's burial spaces, along with the principles of health and hygiene, were directly associated with liberal capital investments, which had consequences in the spatial arrangement of London. Victorian cemeteries, in particular, were not only a solution for overcrowded graveyards, they also acted as urban generators in the formation London's suburbs in the nineteenth century. Beginning with an analysis of the conditions that triggered the introduction of the early Victorian cemeteries in London, this book investigates their spatial arrangement, aesthetics and functions. These developments are illustrated through the study of three private Victorian burial sites: Kensal Green Cemetery, Highgate Cemetery and Brookwood Cemetery. The book is aimed at students and researchers of London history, planning and environment, and Victorian and death culture studies.

1 Health

DOI: 10.4324/9781003178934-2

1.1 Metropolitan sepulchre

In 1824 architect Thomas Willson devised the design for a metropolitan sepulchre in the shape of a 94-storey-high pyramid that would have provided space for five million Londoners, where: “they may repose in perfect security, without interfering with the comfort, the health, the business, the property, or the pursuits of the living” (“The Pyramid Cemetery” 1834, 389–90). The ambitious challenges of achieving large-scale constructions and engineering projects are indeed part of human history, however, in the nineteenth century, it reached new peaks. The introduction of mechanisation, combined with access to prime resources and minerals, allowed engineers and architects to explore construction ideas and concepts at an unprecedented scale. Willson’s landmark pyramid was to be located away from London’s congested urban centre in a prominent elevated position on Primrose Hill, overlooking north London. Covering an area equivalent to the size of Russell Square, this intriguing monolith was intended to provide the equivalent of 1,000 acres of burials, by occupying a relatively small footprint of 18 acres. The rigorous yet repetitive inner structure was made up of an extensive number of equal vaults aligned and stacked towards the tapering top of the pyramid. Designed to attract investors, Willson’s pyramid had an estimated cost at the time of £7 million (Loudon 1829, 214). The Pyramid General Cemetery Company was in charge of the initiative and intended to charge £50 per vault to parishes or directly to individuals (Arnold 2006, 86–7). Willson detailed his ideas in all their technicalities to make the building function. He envisaged external stairs along each side of the pyramid, hydraulic-powered lifts and ventilation systems to deal with decomposing content in his building. Willson’s pyramid was higher than St. Paul’s dome, featured an astronomical observatory at its apex and was toppled by a granite obelisk (389–90). Willson’s megastructure was to be built in bricks and clad in granite. The visionary architect visualised his scheme in a set of evocative architectural drawings that included elevations and sections of his pyramid (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 The metropolitan sepulchre designed by Thomas Willson. Section Drawing. 1829. © London Metropolitan Archives (City of London).

In 1829, discussing Willson’s scheme in one of his articles, the horticulturist, journalist and writer John Claudius Loudon hinted at how complex the possibility to find the ideal solution to the question of London’s dead was:

For London, we would establish two or three burial-grounds, of some hundreds of acres each, a few miles in the country, on the poorest soil, and planted as an arboretum, according to the natural system. But even this we do not think adequate to the wants of an increasing population.

(214)

Willson’s vertical cemetery didn’t manage to attract the attention of investors, firstly because its cost was very high and secondly the construction and completion could have taken at least 20 years (Curl 2001, 36). London needed a more realistic solution that could be implemented in a shorter time frame (“The Pyramid Cemetery” 1834, 389–90). Loudon, commenting, at the time, on Willson’s scheme, reiterated the urgency to act on the question of burial provision. He stated that “no public improvement is more wanted than the removal, in Britain, of burial places from the cities to the country” (Loudon 1829, 214). This was not new though, as Christopher Wren first advanced that solution – after the 1666 Great Fire of London – placing London’s dead beyond the urban boundaries. Wren’s plan, as we know, was not implemented, and the question over the future of London’s burial spaces was left, for the time being, unanswered (as quoted by Bibby in the Historic UK website on 19 January 2020).

Future burial spaces, however, were not only to be of impressive monumental scale, in the city’s landscape, but they also needed to be well connected to the rest of the city and via transport networks. Willson was not alone in scoping for possible design solutions for the ultimate burial of the future. In France, too equally visionary architects started to draw together solutions that addressed the future provision of burials for Paris. Some ideas were presented already at the Grand Prix of 1799 where a variety of monumental forms were explored at large scale, just like Willson’s one. A design proposal by French architect Jacques Molinos also devised a pyramid-shaped building as the landmark feature to the “Field of Rest” cemetery to be built on Montmartre in Paris. Molinos’ pyramid was less grand in scale (only 23 metres high) and contained the cemetery chapel and crematorium (Etlin 1984, 280). As part of the scheme Molinos also designed four mortuary stations for the gathering of the corpses before being transported to the actual cemetery (1984, 273–80). The sanitary issues of how to remove the bodies from private homes were key to his proposal. The core centres of cities such as London or indeed Paris were too overcrowded and needed to be relieved in ways that would allow people to live, work, be connected and carry on with their lives. These schemes provided a substantial and unprecedented rethinking of burial solutions but also investigated how they could be bridging the existing urban fabric of the city to the countryside (see Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2 Design for a “Champs de Repos” in Paris: section through the central pyramid by Jacques Molinos. 1799. © RIBA.

Although Willson’s proposal was criticised at the time, for its imposing scale and for not being technically well resolved, it made the public realise how urgent and complex the question of burial provisions was for an ever-expanding metropolis. Most importantly, Willson’s scheme underlined the urgent need for a realistic solution to be implemented to resolve the issue. Beyond attracting investors, Willson’s design for a metropolitan sepulchre attracted the attention of the sensationalist press and public imagination. Indeed the scale of Willson’s scheme addressed, in such a bold way, the issue of London’s burial provision ahead of its future expansion. Its form and function must have stimulated people’s imagination about the fantastical visions of London’s future metropolitan life to come. Considering that at the time earth burial was the most common practice to dispose of human remains in England, Willson’s earthless vertical cemetery was unprecedented. His imaginative scheme still retains its intrigue today. In 2019 Willson’s drawings were one of the main attractions at the exhibition “The London That Never Was” hosted by the London Metropolitan Archives (LMA). Commenting on the nature of the imaginative visions of a London of the future that never materialised, lead curator and LMA assistant librarian Jeremy Smith, explained that: “Lots of designs were done as fantasy pieces and were never expected to be built” (Buxton 2019). In one of Willson’s existing visualisations of the pyramid, the structure is depicted in isolation with no living presence or indeed a funeral cortege in sight or indeed views of London in the distance. Despite this, Willson’s pyramid proposal is still to this day an audacious idea that states the design ambition and pioneering thinking of the architect, and it is a project that, through scale and form, instantly visualises the complex spatial relationship between the city and its dead.

1.2 Overcrowding

The reasons that brought London’s burials to a critical tipping point in the early nineteenth century are many, it is impossible to single out just one as responsible for the dramatic change. Indeed, events such as the Industrial Revolution in England as well as the political changes taking place across mainland Europe brought a radical change in the way the urban space of cities was questioned, understood and indeed designed (Vidler 2011, 16–7). Schemes such as Willson’s pyramid were one way to frame the issue of burial by drawing public attention to it and address the scale and urgency of the matter due to the fast-growing population of London. In the late eighteenth century, the exodus from the countryside to the city transformed the British economy from mostly agricultural to industrial. In London alone, between 1800 and 1900, the population of London grew from just under one million to 4.5 million (“Report of the Medical Officer of Health for London County Council” 1900, 1). The change was so vast that it had dramatic and unprecedented repercussions on the capital’s urban environment. What may have just worked well up to the late eighteenth century such as roads or housing stock quickly became inadequate and obsolete. Fresh new solutions were needed to cope with the fast-growing numbers of urban dwellers.

The socio-cultural context of nineteenth-century London was driven mostly by the rational laws of trade and commerce and set the ground for scientific and medical research and technological innovation. This approach to change and progress was also endorsed by philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham, who formulated the “greatest happiness principle”. Bentham’s theory, outlined in his An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, published in 1789, advocates the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers. Bentham viewed medical and scientific research as the application of his philosophical theory into a reality that, in his opinion, would benefit society. It was for this reason that he decided to donate his body to science. Although Bentham is recognised as the leader of the so-called Philosophical Radicals and, in particular, Utilitarianism, his research interests also incorporated the theory of law, ethics and politics. For Bentham, each human being naturally attempts to pursue (what they perceive to be) happiness in life and is not able to grasp the implications of their individual choices on a large scale. Bentham believed that the legislator had the duty to intervene and harmonise this process and reach a balance between the private and the public interests (Russell 2008, 698–700).

This principle had a strong impact on shaping the politics and legislative reformation in early nineteenth-century Britain. However, the unprecedented conditions were far more complex and unpredictable than Bentham’s theoretical framework. Effectively there was no cohesive plan that could deal with the consequences generated by the unprecedented fast-growing numbers of urban dwellers. Some of the basic functions of London, such as getting produce to markets and outlets were just as complex as getting access to clean drinking water, or decent shelter or indeed providing suitable burial space to Londoners. In his book Cities, author and photojournalist John Reader looked back at the history of cities and the ecology of urban environments. Talking about nineteenth-century London, Reader explains that:

Keeping the city fed was a huge undertaking – but not one that was centrally controlled, or pre-planned, or growing at a predictable rate. It was growing organically, powered by the economic dynamics of the city itself, regulated by the mechanism of supply and demand, driven by the entrepreneurial instincts of businessmen with an eye on the profit margin.

(2005, 128)

The priorities of the market forces at the time prevailed over those of the otherwise fragmented social fabric of London, overruling even ethical issues such as the disturbance of burial grounds in the name of progress. In his book Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain, historian Anthony Wohl offers another explanation for this issue as in his view “the early and mid-Victorians were, quite simply, pioneers faced with a set of problems that were novel not only in their form but in their magnitude” (1984, 3).

The unprecedented population growth put a major strain on the city’s graveyards and other infrastructures at large (roads, sewage, housing). Indeed, there was no contingency plan either that addressed the provision of housing or burials, therefore solutions emerged, as suggested by Wohl, as and when needed, without a long-term plan but as a quick response to an emerging issue that could also provide a financial return to investors. London, in this respect, was a case of its own, as, unlike other British industrial cities and regions whose economies depended on specific trades or raw materials, London’s diverse economy facilitated an endless source of varied job opportunities, from casual work to banking. Although London’s service economy largely exploited casual, cheap and part-time labour, the commercial success generated by trade with the imperial colonies created middle-class jobs in shipping, banking, investments and insurance. The affluence of the burgeoning middle classes in turn required workers in construction and transportation, as well as in the crafts and artisanal trades, such as tailoring and dressmaking, in addition to retail (Porter 2000, 187). Unlike the trade patterns in other cities, London counted among these many small businesses that offered a variety of services. Fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Health
• 2 Identity
• 3 Suburbs/Kensal Green
• 4 Suburbs/Highgate
• 5 Suburbs/Brookwood and Woking
• 6 Rethinking
• Index