Sadness and spectacular beauty: how Nunhead became one of London’s great Victorian cemeteries

Walk across Peckham Rye and make your way through Solomon's Passage and you'll emerge in Linden Grove, the road that leads up to Nunhead Cemetery. As you climb the hill going past the old waterworks, you'll see the large stone gates ahead, beckoning you into another world - the world of the dead.

As you walk around this old Gothic cemetery on a hazy autumn afternoon you can see the mists of souls that lie beneath the tangled paths of ivy inviting you to stop and take a look at their memorial. Only the chattering of the birds, with the occasional rasping crow giving it that full graveyard effect breaks the silence. All around you there are stone monuments to lives gone by, some cracked and broken, some engulfed by greenery; a whole community that has gone to sleep beneath the canopy of sycamore trees. It's just like a scene in Sleeping Beauty's castle; pure magic. Sad, mournful angels, stone urns swathed in funeral cloth, cherubs and stone pillars abound, commemorating loved ones like a stone version of Family Announcements.

Nunhead cemetery was built in 1840, a time when death was never far from the minds of the people of Victorian Southwark. London had become an overcrowded, choking city that bred diseases such as smallpox, scarlet fever and TB. Infant mortality was high and many women died in childbirth. But people were not afraid of death – after all, it was all around them and for the poorer families they sometimes had to live with a corpse in their house until they had raised the cash to bury it.

Many people made provisions for their funeral before they went and others had a whip-round to ensure their dearly departed had a good send off. They died younger in those dark, smoggy days. A quick look around the cemetery shows that the average age seemed to be around forty-three. Religious beliefs were much stronger than today and many believed they would find peace and happiness for eternity in heaven, and for some it was probably a happy release from the dire conditions they lived in.

But the small parish churchyards were overflowing and couldn’t cope with the amount of corpses needing burial. In some graveyards freshly dead people were lying just a foot from the surface, stacked on top of other corpses. It was unhygienic and distressing for relatives so something had to be done. It was decided to build seven great cemeteries on the outskirts of London, which were designed on the recommendations of one John Claudius London. He believed burial places should be a pleasant area to go and pay your respects, where there were gardens and paths to stroll around. He wanted cemeteries to reflect the nation's progress in civilisation and the arts as well as being a school of instruction in architecture, botany and gardening.

When he designed Nunhead Cemetery, H. James Bunstone Bunning took all this into consideration. The year before the architect had worked with Stephen Gearey on Highgate and was also the surveyor for Brunel's tunnel under the Thames. His vision for Nunhead was spacious groves with well kept lawns and paths that overflowed with flowers.

The space occupies fifty-two acres of land. At the highest point in the cemetery the hills are two hundred feet above sea level and command amazing views over London. For the Victorians it must have been a spectacular sight; even now you can see St Paul's, the BT Tower, Guy's and Canary Wharf framed through the trees – it's a bit like looking out through the keyhole of a secret garden. People would travel up to Nunhead to get some clean air away from the city that clogged their lungs with soot and chemicals. For them, it was a day out and they'd bring a picnic, so once more they could have tea and cake with their late Auntie Maud.

Originally known as All Saint's Cemetery, the graveyard was owned by the London Cemetery Company who built an Anglican chapel along with a Dissenter's chapel inside the grounds. The Dissenter's chapel was sadly destroyed by enemy action during World War Two. The Anglican chapel survived until 1974 when three juvenile arsonists set it alight, completely destroying the interior and roof. After that it lay blackened and crumbling until it was restored, providing a quiet place to sit and contemplate life – and death, of course.

The architect of the chapel was Thomas Little, who designed it from Kentish ragstone, a coarse brittle material that easily attracts dirt, although the facings are of Bath and Portland stone. The crypt is no longer open to receive bodies and has been sealed up.

In 1865 the Cemetery company suffered a major scandal when its secretary Edwin Buxton died, revealing that he had defrauded them out of eighteen-thousand pounds – a lot of notes in those days. But even so he was buried in Nunhead and his tomb can still be seen.

The company then decided to expand their deathly business into horticulture and stonemasonry, becoming a major employer of the area. They built homes to house the workers; Kimberley Avenue being one such site. Henry Daniel was the first to establish a stonemasonry in Nunhead and Daniels Road is named in his honour. He also had works in Highgate but made Nunhead his home, building a large gothic mansion next to his workshops. He died there in 1867 and is buried in the family tomb at Nunhead.

When the London Cemetery Company first opened its gates at Nunhead it was for a child's burial. George Long Shand, a sail maker from Bermondsey, purchased the first grave space for his infant daughter and as the years passed he and other members of the family joined her in the plot.

What an emotive sight it must have been to watch a Victorian funeral making its way to Nunhead's gates. The plumed black horses, their breath steaming out on a cold winter's morning, would wait patiently as men in black top hats carrying black feathered standards would escort the hearse up the hill and into the gothic graveyard. In fact, funeral directors liked to import the horses from Flanders, preferring stallions as mares and geldings tended to turn brown, ruining the sombre effect. At this point cremation wasn't at all popular. It wasn’t until after 1900, when Golder's Green Crematorium opened, that public opinion began to change. Before then, everyone preferred a decent burial with all the trimmings.

As can be expected in such a class-obsessed society as the Victorians, people were not even equal in death. Around the outskirts of Nunhead can be found the less well off family gravestones – simple, rounded headstones with simple but powerful epitaphs.

https://southwarknews.co.uk/news/writer-tracks-nunhead-grave-jack-ripper-suspect/

For those that could only afford the bare minimum undertakers sold cheap little wooden coffins embellished with flimsy tin decorations on the coffin lid. As you walk through the tangled paths you find that a lot of the graves have collapsed in the middle, displacing the stones. This happens when the buried coffin finally rots and caves in, taking a lot of topsoil with it and creating a void. For those with plenty of moola, the top of Nunhead Hill was the place to be: nearer to God and with a fab view of the City of London below – shame they were all dead and couldn't appreciate it.

Nevertheless, monuments large and small tell a fascinating and frequently sad tale of people's lives. There's the couple who married and lost every child they had: six of them, and all mostly just months old. Only one lived until he was six years old. One large monument tells the reader that its occupant was a mother who died seven days after her child was stillborn. They are buried together.

There are also the monuments of the well-heeled, like Thomas Humphreys from Deptford who made his fortune selling firewood, while Bermondsey's Bryan Donkin, whose factory was on the site of Aylwin School, is remembered in his epitaph as being the inventor of the tinned food process.

There are loads of people buried here who, in their day, were very important people. There is a column dedicated to Admiral Nolloth, who gave his name to Port Nolloth in South Africa. Sir Charles Fox, the builder of Crystal Palace is here, along with Bobby Abel, Surrey's ace cricketer. Sir Polydore de Keyser has a mammoth tomb that tells us that he was the first Roman Catholic Mayor in the City of London since the reformation, as well as owning a posh hotel on the north side of Blackfriars Bridge.

Thomas Tilling, Peckham's own omnibus businessman slumbers here, as does John Allan, a shipowner who probably has the most lavish and expensive tomb in the entire cemetery. Many music hall stars are now doing a turn in their graves here, including Augustus Dureneau, who penned the music hall song 'If you want to know the time ask a policeman' (assuming he's done the course at Hendon). He now lies in an unmarked grave after dying in poverty.

Red granite features in some of the best-kept tombs at Nunhead. The Livesey family has an obelisk inscribed with all the family's names, including George Livesey, chairman of the Old Kent Road Gas Works. He provided the first free library for working men, now home to the Livesey Museum.

https://southwarknews.co.uk/history/history-plus/the-old-kent-road-kid-who-rose-to-great-heights-in-gas/

A large red granite cross commemorates Thomas Whichlow, a tanner who lived in Tanner Street and built up a good living from leather. One large vault remembers the Lucey family. Thomas Lucey started out as a lighterman on the Thames and ended up as a rich shipowner.

And let us not forget the heroes from the wars. There is a plot dedicated to commonwealth soldiers who died in Southwark. King's College was used as a hospital for injured soldiers returning from the killing fields of Flanders. Sadly many didn’t recover from their wounds and so were buried at Nunhead. There are also memorials to the borough's war dead and those from Australia.

A most poignant epitaph is to the Walworth boy scouts who drowned in a boating accident at Leysdown in 1912. Sadly, the original was stolen in 1969, so a new replacement memorial of Carrara marble was erected in 1992, which still stands today.

The Nunhead Cemetery memorial

At the time it was a national tragedy and their funeral was a huge procession through the streets of Walworth and Peckham. A life-sized bronze statue of a boy scout marked their grave until it was stolen in 1969. Now a new memorial has taken its place which lists the names of all the boys who died that fateful day. There are also separate plots in the cemetery for children and those of different religions and cultures.

https://southwarknews.co.uk/news/the-tragic-tale-of-nine-walworth-scouts-who-drowned-off-the-coast-of-sheppey-110-years-ago/

Many of the tombstones and statues have a meaning. Inverted torches represent life being snuffed out. Cut flowers and broken columns symbolise life being cut off. Many graves have stone urns with funeral palls draped over them - this is actually a Roman custom. Back in Victorian times, the whole coffin and the pallbearers would be draped with a large funeral cloth. Most of the angels in Nunhead are made of marble and were imported from Italy. The stonemasons would carve the base of the tomb and the angels would be attached to the top.

After the First World War lavish funerals became a thing of the past. The country's change in fortune, plus the concentrated amounts of death and grief, changed attitudes towards funeral customs. Also the increasing cost of maintenance put a strain on the London Cemetery Company. World War Two saw the iron railings disappear for the war effort and many parts of the cemetery were bombed as the Luftwaffe emptied their bomb chambers on the way home.

By 1969 the company could no longer afford to maintain Nunhead and its gates were closed to the public. As the years passed nature took over the cemetery; ivy, sycamore, elder and brambles scrambled across the graves and covered the heavenly faces of the angels and cherubs. Nettles and dock leaves replaced the bedding plants and gravestones became one with the trees as roots grew down into the graves below.

By the seventies the cemetery was in a bad state of disrepair. There were horrific stories of vandalism; graves were smashed, graffiti covered those last words on tombstones. Even worse, there were rumours of black magic and witchcraft being practised after bodies were found pulled from their last resting place.

Yes, something had to be done. Southwark Council along with the Friends of Nunhead Cemetery has once again made Nunhead Cemetery a pleasant place to go. Much of it is still very wild and overgrown, and what gives Nunhead its unique, Sleeping Beauty atmosphere.

https://southwarknews.co.uk/area/nunhead/ruined-nunhead-cemetery-lodge-gets-3-7-million-restoration-cash/

Sadness and spectacular beauty: how Nunhead became one of London’s great Victorian cemeteries

Nunhead cemetery was built in 1840, a time when death was never far from the minds of the people of Victorian Southwark

This is premium content for subscribers only

Tricorns, bicorns, bowlers and more: Christy’s 200 years as Bermondsey’s top hat makers

Greek-style sculptures in Southwark Park which survived six WW2 bombs to be restored

Stay Connected

Popular Articles

Featured Articles

USEFUL PAGES

LEGAL