grave concerns

By Ken Worpole

Stoke Newington’s long association with dissenting opinions and religion is evident in two distinctive local cemeteries: Abney Park Cemetery and the Quaker Burial Ground, just off Yoakley Road. The former is very well known, and was one of what became known as ‘The Magnificent Seven’ of Victorian London cemeteries: Kensal Green (1833), Norwood (1838), Highgate (1839), Abney Park (1840), Brompton (1840), Nunhead (1840) and Tower Hamlets (1841).

All of Abney Park’s original Trustees were Congregationalists, though it was also open to ‘all classes of the community and to all denominations of Christians without restraint in forms’. Finally opened to the public in May 1840, it was designed equally as an arboretum, based on the collection of mature trees already planted, the legacy of several fine houses and gardens which had occupied the site before, to which were added many new plantings commissioned by the Cemetery Trustees from the local – and famous – Loddige’s Nursery in Mare Street, Hackney. At the height of its success as an arboretum, it had more than 2,500 different species of trees, more than the Royal Park at Kew, making it a tourist attraction, as well as a place for the burial of the dead.

The handsome gates at the entrance to Abney Park Cemetery, restored in the late 1990s, were designed in the ‘Egyptian Style’ associated in this period with funerary architecture, and hieroglyphs engraved over the cemetery lodge-houses proclaimed ‘The Gates of the Abode of the Mortal Part of Man’. The cemetery also contained a gothic-style Chapel (the subject of limited restoration), several war memorials, and many thousands of family chapels, mausoleums, tombs, tombstones, and other grave markings. Over 300,000 people have been buried in Abney Park Cemetery since it opened.

Over the next hundred and fifty years it became the final resting place of many distinguished non-conformist families, including that of General Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, whose hearse was followed by tens of thousands of mourners when he was buried there in 1912. Not all the large headstones belong to local ministers and divines. Also buried in the cemetery are such notable 19th century political radicals as William Hone (1780 – 1842), bookseller and author, once prosecuted for blasphemy, and whose funeral Charles Dickens attended, and James Bronterre O’Brien (1805-1864), the Chartist leader.

One of the most interesting sculptures – especially fascinating to children – is the giant white marble ‘Sleeping Lion’, marking the grave of Susannah and Frank Bostock, well-known Victorian menagerists. It is directly linked to a similar lion, called Nero, in the Western Cemetery at Highgate, overlooking the Circle of Lebanon, which marks the grave of another menagerist, George Wombwell, connected to the Bostocks in Abney Park by marriage.

The cemetery is now slowly being restored to some of its former grandeur and beauty by the Abney Park Trust, though there are some locals who seem to take greater pleasure in its more overgrown and labyrinthine pathways and copses, than in the areas which have been cleared and tided up.

The Quaker Burial Ground is much less known and, indeed, is largely hidden from public view, as it rests behind a 1950s housing estate and the relatively modern Stoke Newington Community Seventh-Day Adventist Church in Yoakley Road. (It can also be accessed via Brett Close, off Lordship Road.) Yet it is worth a visit, as one small part of it is still extant, and neatly maintained by Hackney Council to their credit, while other areas have been cleared and the headstones moved and put against the surrounding walls. The Quaker community has reformed again in Stoke Newington in recent years, and symbolically held one of its first gatherings in the old burial ground.

FORTHCOMING HACKNEY SOCIETY LECTURE

‘A walk in the Paradise Gardens: Abney Park Cemetery and the European tradition of cemetery design’. A slide-lecture by Ken Worpole, based on his new book, ‘Last Landscapes: the architecture of the cemetery in the West’. Free admission. Thursday, 15 January 2003, 6.30 – 8.30 pm, in the Library Hall, Edward’s Lane, Stoke Newington (rear of Stoke Newington Library).