Kensal Green, of course, lies well outside our Society's local area. In view of the trip being organised for next May, I thought this volume worthy of notice, however. It is the first study of a single London cemetery from all points of view - historical, architectural and artistic, and conservationist. Contributors include J. S. Curl and Ruth Richardson on the history of the cemetery, Chris Brooks and John Physick on the monuments, Eric Robinson on the geology of the cemetery, and Julian Litten on the funeral customs of the past.
The General Cemetery of All Souls, to give it its full name, was founded in 1832 with the purchase of 53 acres of what was then open fields to the west of London. It was a privately-backed commercial venture - the first of the great London cemeteries (the others being Highgate, Abney Park, Brompton, and Nunhead). In the early years, returns to shareholders in these ventures were comparable or superior to those of other capital-intensive speculations of the period such as railways. Body-snatching was still rife while the Cemetery was being projected, and the original pitch to would-be customers was to have been that of the physical security of the deceased's remains, as symbolised by the massive curtain wall on the Harrow road and the reassuring classical architecture of the chapels and colonnades. But this selling proposition was to be refuted almost immediately by the passing of the Anatomy Act 1832 which made the corpses of the destitute available for medical research. Kensal Green had a quiet few years until the patronage of minor royalty and of a number of solid Victorian citizens who had been among its original backers put it on the map as a respectable place to be buried.
The problem with the "business model" of a cemetery as a commercial venture with grave rights sold in perpetuity is that eventually the ground fills up, leaving no operating revenue stream. This was foreseen by J. C. Loudon, who proposed as early as 1843 that when cemeteries filled up they should become public parks with the monuments maintained at public expense - and prophesied that one day cremation (not practised in England at that date) would become universal. Kensal Green had the option to expand by the purchase of some additional acres to the west, before it was swallowed up by London in the late 19th century. Apart from Kensal Green, which continues as an operational business, the fate of the 19th century London cemeteries in latter years has been depressing. The cemetery companies have mostly gone into liquidation, abandoning the cemeteries to the custody of local authorities who have understandably been reluctant to deal with them as anything other than a maintenance or vandalism problem to be cleared away. Highgate is now owned by its Friends charity, which has carried out pioneering conservation work, and is once again open for interments, albeit with burial rights sold on a lease-only basis and at very considerable expense. Kensal Green has its own Friends organisation, which carries out conservation work and organises tours for visitors, but which the Charity Commissioners have refused permission to register as a charity on the grounds that its conservation and research work would merely benefit the General Cemetery Company.
Some of the difficult conservation dilemmas raised by the essays in this volume are: the clearance of ivy and other undergrowth: the repair of exposed (through weathering or vandalism) geological texts within monuments: disruption to the original garden layout and planting, and to established ecological microenvironments in the vicinity of graves, through continued use for burials, or conservation work. Some volunteers who conserved other cemeteries back in the 1970s and 80s had convinced themselves that, by definition, there could never be any internal conflict between "conservation" aims and objectives, and that the only conflict worth expatiating on was that between "conserving a cemetery", whatever that meant, and a local authority's low-minded, commercial intention to sell the land to a property developer. We can now see that conserving a local ecosystem involving moss, ivy, and lichen, may be disastrous for the conservation of statuary and monuments. These questions have been posed, but no more, by the volume under review. Any future historical analysis of conservation practices should, I think, try to find a morally neutral language to describe how such difficult choices were tackled.