Kensal green cemetery

Written by i j

Tuesday, 23 February 2010 20:05

Thanks to a comment from one of our readers I have discovered a precious cemetery located in London, it seems to be the first one of the great London cemeteries, we talk about…

Kensal Green Cemetery

Kensal Green was the first of the commercial cemeteries open to the public in London. The Cemetery General Company (founded in 1830) bought the next year 54 acre of land for 9400 pounds in the southern area called “Harrow Road”, they quickly planted 800 trees and opened a contest for designing the chapel and the entrance door.

The motivation for the creation of this (and other) cementeries) was to free the overcrowded and unhealthy London cemetery of some pressure.

The winner was a gothic design but President Sir John Deal Paul insisted in that the project was classic Greek themed, that ended with a Doric porch with offices and a resident as entrance to the cemetery.

Once you get inside if you keep in the main road you will reach the chapel which has another Doric porch, under it there are waiting the catacombs, for getting inside you use a noisy hydraulic elevator, at the end of the cemetery you will find a smaller chapel and in the northern wall a line of columns that open path to another entrance to the catacombs.

When you walk though Kensal Garden streets you cant avoid getting surprised by the atypical shape of the tombstones, there are tombstones of all kind but they also lie in terrible disorder, or even felt ones by the action of the trees roots, its also possible to find broken pantheons or open tombs

I wonder why we don’t have those kind of cemeteries in Spain for being able to rest (in life or not) in places like that.

Anyway, those cemeteries gained popularity during the Victorian epoch with their elaborated funerals. In deed it was after the burial of Sussex duke in 1843 and princess Sofia in 1848 that Kensal Green became the favourite place for being buried in all the English imperia, attracting, literally hundreds of aristocrats, celebrities and high class people (which explain the ornamentation of most of the cemetery tombs).

Of course that epoch has to get to an end and slowly the cemetery started to decay, during those days the cemetery suffered damage specially during the WWII bombardments which… for good or bad… give it a much darker aspect

This cemetery has more than 65000 tombs surrounded by trees and magnificent monuments that create the perfect romantic atmosphere.

Nowadays the cemetery is in process of being restored but in the mean time its possible to visit the catacombs each Sunday afternoon guided by some of the members of the Kensal cemetery friends association.

That’s all what I could gather com kensal cemetery… I’m sorry that I feel I didn’t wrote my best English in this article but sincerely I’m really tired today and I did what I could :P.