Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

London is built upon its dead.

On our last visit to London, during an unseasonably warm April, we opted to flee from the Holy Week/Royal Wedding crowds that thronged the city center and seek a quiet, shaded walk. We found it in Kensal Green, one of the six great Victorian cemeteries that ring London. It was a spontaneous choice, our walk amongst the tombs, but it piqued my curiosity enough that I wanted to learn more about these somber, beautiful places of death.

Thus, when a friend told me about Catharine Arnold’s Necropolis: London and its Dead, I snapped it up.

It’s difficult for Americans to comprehend, sometimes, how young our nation is when compared to the rest of the civilized world. Though the native populations of the Americas had been here for thousands of years, they left the continent virtually unmarked by their presence. Seattle, where I live, was not here 150 years ago. Our streets were built on land uncut, our city laid out on land that had never known one stone stacked upon another. This is true of all American cities. There are no ruins of empires past beneath our feet. When we dig in the earth, we do not find coins of Rome or remnants of a Norseman’s armor. Thus, when we travel abroad and visit cities that have been in existence for centuries, for millennia, it is often difficult for us to grasp what that really means.

In the case of London, it means that the city is not only built upon the ruins of its past but that it is, quite literally, built upon the bodies of its dead.

Necropolis is more than just the history of London’s great Victorian cemeteries, though they certainly play a major role. Catharine Arnold, a journalist and academic, delves deeper that this (no pun intended) and compares burial methods, funerary customs, and the concept of mourning itself throughout London’s two thousand year history. She takes us back to the city’s beginning as a metropolis and returns us to modern day, taking us from Boudica to the Blitz, from the Black Death to the funeral of Diana, exploring not only where London buried its dead, but how and why it was done in that manner.

To be honest, there are parts of Arnold’s book that are just ghastly and quite possibly too much for the squeamish reader. The realities of small, parish churchyards are grim enough in the best of times, but when the city suffered the Black Death, plagues, and cholera outbreaks, the results were positively nightmarish. If, like me, your mental image of a cemetery is a broad expanse of ground with well-separated tombstones, each with one body per plot, then this book will be a true education. The practice of stacking five or ten bodies in each grave and the notion that sections of a churchyard cemetery would be “cleaned out” and made ready for a fresh set of deceased parishioners, may reek of desecration and sacrilege to our modern sensibilities, but they were common practice for centuries. Remember the gravediggers in Hamlet, pulling Yorick’s skull out of the new grave they were digging for Ophelia? This was an everyday occurrence in London’s urban graveyards.

London’s relationship with its dead reached its apex during the Victorian era, when as a solution to the execrable and unsanitary condition of its parish churchyards, the city established new, suburban cemeteries. Arnold shows us how these “sleeping places of the dead,” far different from the noisome charnel pits of the inner city, changed funeral customs entirely for Londoners. The cult of mourning, personified by Queen Victoria herself, and the excesses of funerary trappings and tombs, modeled how people across the Continent and around the Empire would mourn. Arnold spends a lot of her book on this period, and rightly so. She discusses not only the costs and the social pressures of Victorian funerals, but provides us context with which to understand this explosion of public sentimentality.

Likewise Arnold shows us how, as these Victorian resting places began to fill and with corpses provided by the two-fisted tragedy of World War One and the Spanish Flu epidemic, sensibilities changed once more and burial lost favor as cremation gained acceptance. I found especially fascinating how proponents of cremation used the looting of the royal tombs in St. Denis during the French Revolution as an extremely effective piece of propaganda for their cause.

In some ways, London has come full circle, from Roman times to today, but in others, each age has left its stamp upon how London–and the world at large–honors its dead. For two millennia, London has been the “maker of manners” in many things. From commoner to king, as we die, London has–for good or ill–guided our customs and our expressions of grief.

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