Just before the pandemic, I was able to visit Brompton Cemetery and Crossbones Graveyard, two of the oldest burial sites in the London area. Brompton, opened in 1840, is still an active cemetery today. It is also a protected Royal Park with a cafe, groundskeepers, and a well-utilized dog walking trail. Conversely, Crossbones was essentially a dumping ground for the bodies of ‘single women’ (AKA sex workers) and their children. Crossbones is unconsecrated, and there is no official record of the estimated 15,000 bodies laid to rest there. Although these graveyards paint two very different pictures of London, Crossbones being the Shakespeare to Brompton’s Victoria, they were both active in the 1840s. The sex workers of Crossbones were not a distant memory when Brompton opened, but a recent one. Modern incarnations of Brompton and Crossbones show people the values of London society, as well as British society at large – The pictures of London one sees while visiting each burial site are not different at all, but in fact two pieces of the same puzzle, uniting with every other aspect of London to create the image of the crown gem of British colonial society.
Brompton Cemetery is about as well-kept as any 200 year-old, 40-acre park filled with thousands of decaying bodies can be. The exceptional state of the park is achieved through the money and time allotted to it. This place, these people, are seen as important and everyone can tell upon entering the park grounds. Many of London’s most famous are buried there, and the space is a community hub for the Kensington neighborhood in which it is situated. Kensington is a historically affluent part of the city which was built around a royal manor, and while there I saw uncharacteristically clean bricks for a tightly-packed city like London and a modern university tucked in between the townhouses. The neighborhood was so clean it felt like an early Tim Burton set, fake and picturesque. I felt as though the bricks would crumble into little styrofoam pebbles if I touched them, but the reality is that these edifices are very much made of stone. Burial inside city boundaries has been an expensive endeavor for centuries now, a final act of class for the rich members of society. In order to be counted among those buried in Brompton, one needs to have the money to pay for a plot there. It would be naive to assume that the inhabitants of the cemetery and the fact that it is owned by the Crown had no effect on the place becoming one of the famed Magnificent Seven, a group of Victorian garden cemeteries which have been granted a special status by the Royal Family and British government. This place is a monument to British wealth and everything that made it, and that is a very clean way of defining the cemetery.
Brompton was commissioned by and for the wealthy, and as a result it is quite lovely and well-constructed. I will admit that overall, I did enjoy my visit. The whole of the cemetery is built around a Chapel, with paths that take the mourners on a leisurely journey to the place of worship. Everything leads to the Chapel. The garden-cemeteries of the 19th century were designed with the goal of comforting those in mourning as well as entertaining those who simply desired a stroll through greenery and sculpture, and Brompton toes that line quite well. However, even in the design aspects of this cemetery class and status (and therefore classism) were accounted for. The map below, taken from the Royal Parks leaflet,
shows the location of the cemetery chapel. Fenced in and tightly-packed around it are many graves of the wealthiest corpses of 1800s London society. This practice conveys the belief that money brings people closer to God, that riches will give you heaven. Getting a plot in Brompton was a status symbol to those who could not get in themselves, but a status symbol for the other members of this elite group was the specific place where one was laid to rest.
It is only natural that a cemetery which represents the ‘best’ of British society will be Protestant in nature. There are symbols strewn throughout Brompton; general expressions of mourning, religion, and nationalism. Victorian mourning symbols include imagery such as urns, winged skulls or hourglasses, and roses. These symbols are ‘a-religious’ in nature, but they actually harken back to Greco-Roman burial traditions and were developed inside the culturally Christian societies in which they are generally used. The idea behind these symbols in Brompton is to express mourning and love without veering into the religious idolatry which caused the Protestant reformation. The few concrete and indubitably Christian symbols in the cemetery also follow that unspoken rule, meaning that the graves are rarely adorned with anything more than a crucifix. That being said, the more nationalist symbols are arguably solely idolizing in nature. These symbols are less defined than their counterparts, they are carved into the very buildings that Brompton is built around. The style that Brompton’s chapels, statues, and other buildings were constructed in is a neoclassical revival, reminiscent of Roman architecture. Because the Roman Empire serves as inspiration for the Western world, particularly the British Empire, the use of Roman architecture and the depiction of Roman gods can be seen as a validation of the Empire and colonialist views. Death is a requirement for any empire, and therefore people need to think within a framework that allows them to justify those deaths. Subscribing to the views of the British Empire means that one must see death as something that can be worthy and honorable if done for ‘Queen and Country.’ The Greco-Roman symbolism in Brompton serves not only as a visually pleasing theme but also external validation of the British colonialist state and its crimes.
For all that Brompton is a symbol of the selective British upper-class, Crossbones Graveyard is a symbol of those hurt and left behind by them. This was the unhallowed ground which the sex workers of London (often colloquially referred to as “Geese”) were destined to be buried in. These women did not have the privilege of controlling their final resting place; Crossbones was where they were condemned to lie. The graveyard itself is about the size of the average suburban backyard, but despite the lack of square footage it is estimated that at least 15,000 people are buried there. Of these people, the majority of the non-”Geese” interred there are the children of the buried sex workers and their clients who died in childbirth or adolescence. While there was a sense that these women (and their children) were shameful, their profession was sanctioned by the church and enjoyed by the highest classes. Crossbones Graveyard is the physical evidence of the hypocrisy of the British church and subsequently the evidence of the hypocrisy of mainstream British culture as it evolved from medieval times to the Victorian era. This article from a 2014 issue of the Evening Standard shows how the lack of respect for these women has been carried through London society for centuries.
The Standard article states “[T]he cemetery near London Bridge… has been coveted in recent years by developers as part of a larger 200,000sqft site for office and residential schemes.” The fact that people were ready to effectively erase the lives of all of those buried at Crossbones in favor of turning a profit is proof that the women and children are considered expendable, unimportant, and even worthless to those with power and money. However, those with legislative and financial powers are not the only people with a voice in London’s affairs, and the Friends of Crossbones successfully campaigned to have the graveyard spared.
The decoration of Crossbones Graveyard is a recent and almost uncharacteristically pleasant development in the site’s tumultuous history. In 1998, the Friends of Crossbones was created as an informal group to hold vigils for the dead and care for the land where they were buried, and in the years since then there have been many different people creating and leaving tokens of remembrance large and small in the Crossbones garden. As with Brompton, the goal is to create a place of mourning which pleasantly invites onlookers to learn about the history of the people laid to rest there. The art in Crossbones is all very personal in nature, the graveyard is filled with symbols from various cultures and religions which were hand-picked and handmade by people mourning those they never even knew. Some of the pieces includes a garden by one of Vivienne Westwood’s former gardeners, which has taken the indigenous plants and cultivated them to the point of art, many different depictions of saints and other revered figures, sculptures, paintings, poems, and a watermelon tourmaline charm I left there which is supposed to bring luck to whomever wears it. More famous than that is the fence around the burial ground, tied with charms and available for adornment even when none of the Friends of Crossbones are there to unlock the gate. Catholicism and non-Christian religions are much more visible within Crossbones than in Brompton, and this is likely because these people are ostracized by British society and therefore feel kinship with those buried in Crossbones. Due to the transformative nature of the art in Crossbones, it is difficult to define all of the symbols, however one thing is clear: the site is covered in reminders that all of these women and children existed, no matter how many people were ashamed of them.
sources: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20237930, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1586841, https://www.royalparks.org.uk/parks/brompton-cemetery, https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/a-graphic-guide-to-cemetery-symbolism, https://crossbones.org.uk/history/, all photos are my own unless stated otherwise.