This exhibition (March 2002 - Feb 2003) has now closed in London. The information below was added in March 2002:
Here is the Press Release for the forthcoming exhibition. [Note: page now removed.]
Here are two BBC stories regarding the exhibition: (1), (2), and here are Prof von Hagens' sites Body Worlds and Plastination.
Comment, added 8 March 2003: the Tory MPs who jumped up and down, howling for Body Worlds to be closed, had obviously never been to the Royal College of Surgeons on the south side of Lincoln's Inn Fields, otherwise they would be calling for the Hunterian Museum to be shut down too. On the history of the exhibits at the RCS, see Dr Ruth Richardson's "Death, Dissection and the Destitute", recently reissued in paperback.
This page contains an up-to-date (16.x.01) list of London cemeteries' Friends' websites - more up-to-date, I believe, than can be found elsewhere. It has a couple of other links which may be of use/ interest.
The private enterprises which operated the great cemeteries of the 19th century and sold plots in perpetuity, are either now defunct (their income having dried up when the cemetery became full) or live on in collaboration with a Friends organisation. Below are listed the Friends' websites. Particulars of the freeholder of each site, and whether it is open for new interments, should be sought from the Friends.
Some of the above are registered charities, others are not. Here are the registrations of London Friends' groups that are registered charities.
Kensal Green Cemetery is a new book (published November 2001) all about the Cemetery and its history. This is my review of it.
This is the business subsidiary of the Memorial Arts Charity which promotes the crafts of memorial masonry and lettering. Why have an identi-headstone in polished black with machined lettering in white/ gold that looks as though it has come out of a word-processor (which, in effect, it has), when you can pay not much more for a hand-carved hand-lettered memorial? Memorials by Artists can put you in touch with a craftsman who can create the latter for you. This site has photographs of hauntingly beautiful headstones - the only shame is that some of them are made of types of stone likely to laminate with exposure, and "open up like the pages of a book" to borrow a phrase from the geologist Eric Robinson. But then again, I speak as an amateur of granites. On the subject of lettering: the font 'Times Roman' was designed for use in a small point-size in a newspaper - NOT for a gravestone. Thought-experiment: Imagine the inscriptions on Trajan's Column, or on the pediment of the Pantheon in Rome, in pantographically-enlarged (or PostScript) 'Times Roman': does the combination of zero aesthetic impact, with lack of proportion, do anything for you? No, I thought not.
Charitable publishers of death-related material, and promoters of an ecologically sound approach to funerals and cremation/ interment. A mix of sound and fairly worldly advice, an openness to the modern concept of the instant tradition/ home-made ceremony (often non- or anti-Christian), together with, I am afraid, a certain amount of wool-gathering. Their main book "The New Natural Death Handbook" (3rd edn., 2000) can be found in large bookshops and can also be ordered directly from the NDC. The website contains, inter alia, material in rebuttal of Sam Weller's rather sweeping criticisms of the woodland burial concept in his "Guide to Funerals and Bereavement" (Kogan Page/ Daily Telegraph, 1999).