Oh, the Magnificent Seven! Spectacular gardens filled with remarkable examples of funerary art – now, with that perfect touch of romantic decay, they’re more beautiful than ever! Highgate, the most famous one, attracts 100,000 tourists a year. Everyone knows these gems!

But have you ever wondered WHY they were created? Well, buckle up for the gruesome story of London’s great Victorian cemeteries…

In the 19^th century, the Industrial Revolution turned London into a commercial capital of the world, drawing people in like moths to a flame. With all the penny-less dreamers hoping for a better future, its population skyrocketed from a little under a million in 1801 to nearly two and a half by 1851! The poor workers lived in overcrowded slums, with open sewers running through the narrow streets, sharing mouldy water pumps and slimy outdoor loos with dozens of neighbours. A family of fourteen could be crammed into a space no bigger than your bedroom, sleeping on piles of rags on the floor.

Unfortunately, with the increase of the living, there also came an increase of the dead ones. And, as you can imagine, thanks to overworking, malnutrition and all kinds of nasty diseases, the mortality rate was high as the sky! People were traditionally buried in small graveyards around local churches – which, surrounded by other buildings, had rather limited capacity…

At some point they couldn’t cope with the demand, so the slots, already packed tightly, had to be continuously reused to make room for newcomers. Yes, we’re talking about exhuming few-weeks-old corpses… Chopped into bits and pieces, they were left scattered around or dumped into ‘bone house’ – a giant pit filled with rotting body parts. Occasionally, when such pits were full, they’d scoop up the top layer, grind it up and sell as a garden fertiliser.

Shocking? Oh, it gets worse…

The graves were so shallow that bodies tended to poke through the surface after heavy rains, causing mourners to slip on them during funerals. The stench was so bad that locals had to keep their windows always shut. On the good side – they could also collect scraps of coffins scattered across the graveyard and use them as a free firewood!

Decaying human remains contaminated water supplies, causing regular epidemics and bringing even more deaths… Meaning more corpses to squeeze into already congested churchyards!

Victorian gravediggers had lots of additional work to do. Opening coffins, emptying and burning them, chopping and grinding rotting corpses… Sometimes they also had to drill holes in sealed coffins of the rich, kept in church vaults, to release the gas before it caused a messy, intestine-splattering explosion, giving them an extra cleanup to do. Yuck!

Fun fact: the corpse gas is flammable, so accidental fires were also a thing…

The smell? Absolutely revolting! It would make them vomit, trigger debilitating migraines, or even cause sudden death by suffocation. And if that wasn’t bad enough, gravediggers often caught typhus or smallpox from handling remains of the sick ones. Their daily tasks were so unbelievably disgusting, they had to be drunk just to make it through – slowly turning into full-blown alcoholics.

Cheap coffins and shallow graves were basically an open invitation for grave robbers. It wasn’t even about stealing anything precious – everyone was afraid of body snatchers, known also as ‘resurrectionists’ or ‘ghouls’, digging up fresh stiffs and selling them to anatomy schools for dissections.

Of course, the future doctors had to understand human body to save lives. Medical schools needed a steady supply of fresh corpses, but back then, the only legally available ones were those of executed criminals, so at some point the demand exceeded supply, leaving the medical students with two options: accepting donations from body snatchers on a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ basis, or getting a little creative and finding the cadavers themselves.

Yup, quite an easy choice!

Selling stolen corpses was a lucrative business, but it also required a lot of effort. To make their job easier, some snatchers would murder their victims rather that digging them up. Another, less drastic method was pretending to be family members and claiming the bodies of paupers from workhouses, asylums and hospitals. A bit morbid, but effective.

In 1823, Reverend Howse came up with an ingenious solution for London’s overflowing graveyards… He built a Baptist chapel right on top of an open sewer, with the upstairs dedicated for worship, and downstairs – for the burial. Since he charged way less than nearby parishes, and normally only the rich were buried inside churches, Enon Chapel quickly became popular among the locals.

But soon, the congregation started noticing some… issues. Mostly a bad smell and peculiar taste in their mouths during services. Praising the Lord with a handkerchief pressed to their noses, they were still passing out sometimes. And why there were so many flies crawling out from between the creaky floorboards…?

The horrifying truth came out in 1839, when a new sewer had to be installed under the chapel… Within 16 years, Howse stuffed around 12,000 corpses (!!!) into every nook and cranny of the basement, which was about the size of a volleyball court, occasionally dumping some of them in a sewer that ran directly under the building. The rotting dead, separated from people praying upstairs with only a flimsy layer of wood, were packed from the floor to ceiling like sardines, mostly without coffins. Well, it takes less space – plus the cheeky Reverand and his wife could burn the wood instead and keep themselves toasty for free!

Soon a group of Londoners, up to their noses with dead bodies scattered around parish churches and making the whole neighbourhood stink, decided to fight for the change their city desperately needed. These two fiery activists knew how to shake things up:

As his surgical practice was situated nearby Enon Chapel, George was unfortunate to see its famous macabre vault, which shook him so much, that he spent the rest of his life on a mission to stop burying people within towns. In his book, Gatherings from graveyards (1839), Walker published a nightmarish survey of 47 London burial grounds, writing with all the grisly details about exhumations, 20-feet-deep bone pits and corpse gas killing the gravediggers.

Interested in boosting the living conditions of the poorest, in his Sanitary Report (1842) Chadwick presented the grim reality of London’s graveyards and slums. He campaigned for cemeteries ran by the government, with funerals as public services – as well as for the clear water supply in every house, and drainage system instead of street sewers. His efforts played a huge role in shaping the Public Health Act of 1848.

Reformers, supported by celebrities like Charles Dickens, kicked off with rallying the masses, mocking the authorities and demanding radical solutions – precisely ending burials in the City’s graveyards and church vaults. They were convinced that nasty diseases like cholera were spread by ‘miasma’ – a poisonous, stinky mist arising from rotting bodies.

Little did they know, it wasn’t about breathing in the evil air, but more like drinking a corpse juice… Well, it was a deadly mix of poor hygienic conditions and stagnant water spoiled with human waste. Their believes, however, spurred the action in the right direction – keeping the dead away from the living!

Of course, the burial reformers were keep facing objections, both from the government and the clergy. The MPs, as per usual, had more important things to do than taking care of the endlessly moaning working class, especially its already expired members. With their fancy private vaults in churches, they couldn’t be bothered about where all these filthy, dead povvos go!

Vicars, on the other hand, were turning blind eye to what happened to bodies after being crammed into (or spread around…) their churchyards. It was all fine, as long as they were paid the burial fee – and got a cut of the profits from body snatchers as a little bonus!

I mean, London technically had cemeteries separated from Anglican churches – but they were either Jewish, for Non-conformists or prostitutes. Something else was needed!

Years before, when Paris had similar problem with overflowing graveyards, French government banned burials there and opened a huge cemetery on its outskirts. Pere Lachaise, with its neat and tidy tomb-lined avenues, seemed like a perfect idea to apply also in England’s capital!

Interestingly, back in the 1660s, Sir Christopher Wren, an architect involved in rebuilding London after The Great Fire, already proposed a burial ground outside the city, but it was rejected by the authorities…

In 1821, after visiting Pere Lachaise, George Frederick Carden became OBSESSED with it – and with creating its London equivalent! As a businessman, he couldn’t ignore the potential profits from burials – everyone dies, meaning a glorious, never-ending flow of customers! His plan was simple: a joint-stock company with cemetery as a form of property development. So, he found wealthy investors, launched the General Cemetery Company, and started negotiating the required permission.

In 1832, the Parliament finally passed an act authorising the setup of private burial grounds outside London, keeping the evil ‘miasma’ away from the crowds! Yay! That’s exactly what Carden and his General Cemetery Company were waiting for!

Oh, and a special clause had to be added, so that the clergy would get a fee to compensate their loss…

Kensal Green was opened in 1833, and over the next decade more private garden cemeteries sprung up on the suburbs of London: Norwood (1836), Highgate (1839), Nunhead (1840), Abney Park (1840), Brompton (1840) and Tower Hamlets (1841).

Each of them was designed to look absolutely spectacular!  From sentimental parks to grand open-air cathedrals, and from gothic splendour to classical elegance – whatever suited your fancy. Chapels and mausoleums, created by the best architects, were surrounded by a variety of elaborate monuments. Decorative trees and flowering shrubs along carefully lined paths, as well as carpet beddings, could compete with the most beautiful parks. Closed and guarded at night, private cemeteries were safe from body snatchers. Could they be more perfect for the middle- and upper-classes to show off their wealth?

Unfortunately, the beautiful gardens of sleep didn’t solve London’s stinky problem… They were well beyond the means of the poor, who still had to squish in shared graves around local churches. The burial reformers were as determined as ever – spreading public awareness through pamphlets and tormenting authorities with petitions.

In 1842, almost ten years after opening of the first private cemetery, the campaigns finally caused the government to recognise the scale of a problem! A special committee was appointed to investigate the state of London’s burial grounds, and – surprise, surprise! – Walker and Chadwick proved their point. They were officially a danger to human health!

Yaaay! Sorted!

Well… not really. The government, as per usual, was dragging its feet and needed few more years and something TRULY EXTREME – a proper shove to get it into gear…

…and it came in the form of cholera epidemic that hit London like a sledgehammer, taking out nearly 15,000 people in just three years and turning the burial system into complete shambles!

Wait, hold on – could it even get any worse?! Oh, you bet…

Believe it or not, but with people dropping like flies, church graveyards already bursting at seams, and the shiny new cemeteries being like VIP clubs for the rich, London seriously ran out of places to stash all the corpses. At some point, they were just piled up or scattered all over the churchyards, which were regularly topped up with soil to hide the problem, making them rise higher and higher above the street level… It was so bad, they had to bring back the plague pit system that hasn’t been used since the Black Death days in 1660s!

London turned from metropolis to necropolis, a macabre ‘city of the dead’, jam-packed with an absolutely mind-blowing number of bodies.

But thanks to this, in 1852, after a series of morbid scandals and relentless campaigns by the reformers, the government FINALLY clocked on and realised the scale of the problem! They passed the Burial Acts, shutting down 213 overflowing burial grounds in London and setting up public cemeteries instead – open to everyone, regardless of their class, faith and funds. All the bodies from the closed burial grounds were supposed to be relocated there, and the old sites – reused.

I mean… That was the plan – but do we really think they moved every last one of them? Hmm… let’s just say, don’t go digging too deep into your local park!

And that’s how London’s gruesome burial grounds upgraded into beautiful Victorian gardens of death. Apart of them, there are 124 city-run cemeteries today and several more private ones.

Numerous old graveyards and plague pits, closed in 1852, have disappeared later due to railway extensions. Many partly remain as parks or playgrounds, with small reminders of their history in a form of a single headstone or a memorial plaque. Some of them are built up with busy roads, car parks, supermarkets, schools, office blocks or housing estates.

Yes… you may not even know that you live on top of one.

So, next time you stroll around the City, take a closer look at these little patches of greenery squeezed between the buildings – especially next to churches, with height of the grounds suspiciously above the street level… Now you know that thousands of Londoners are still there – nameless, forgotten and soaked into this soil forever.

And don’t let yourself be fooled anymore by how many headstones you see at any old graveyard – it’s nowhere close to the actual number of corpses crammed there!

Any spooky experiences or eerie vibes felt on former burial grounds? Don’t be shy… I’m dying to read them!

Main sources:
NECROPOLIS: LONDON AND ITS DEAD by C. Arnold (Pocket Books, 2007)
THE VICTORIAN CEMETERY by S. Rutheford (Shire Publications, 2008)
LONDON’S HIDDEN BURIAL GROUNDS by R. Bard & A. Miles (Amberley Publishing, 2017)