London’s Magnificent Seven cemeteries were built to ease the city’s overflowing graveyards. These beautifully landscaped Victorian open-air museums of funerary art quickly became resting places of the elite.

But what if I told you there was one more – the Magnificent Eighth?

Victoria Park Cemetery was wiped off the map after only three decades. Unlike Highgate or Kensal Green, it didn’t become a historic landmark. Today, it’s just another park where children play and joggers pass by, unaware of its dark secret – 300,000 bodies lying beneath their feet.

So, what happened?

Here’s a tragic story of London’s forgotten grand Victorian cemetery…

When Charles Salisbury Butler bought this patch of land on London’s outskirts in 1840, he had big plans – selling it off as prime building plots. Unfortunately, things didn’t quite go as expected, so he leased it to the Victoria Park Cemetery Company instead.

The company wasted no time, eager to repeat the success of seven already existing private cemeteries surrounding London. They walled off the land, added an impressive arched Gothic gateway, and even threw in two chapels designed by Arthur Ashpitel, despite the fact that the ground was never actually consecrated. By 1845, Victoria Park Cemetery was up and running as London’s eighth private garden cemetery – and the biggest of them all.

Was it a good idea, though?

Well… not really. In the 18th century, Bethnal Green was a charming village, famous for its market gardens and flourishing silk-weaving industry. But by the mid-19th century, the story had taken a darker turn – it couldn’t compete with mechanisation and fell into decline, turning into the poorest area of London.

People were crammed into slums, living in dark, soggy, rotting buildings. With such unhealthy living conditions, constant hunger, lack of nutrition, non-existent healthcare, and disease thriving thanks to open sewers, the demand for burial spaces was high – but people of Bethnal Green definitely couldn’t afford prices of fancy private cemeteries.

To make matters worse, just a mile down the road, Tower Hamlets Cemetery was already offering budget-friendly burials. Victoria Park tried to compete, slashing its prices lower and lower, until it was making no profit at all.

On top of that, one of the cemetery clerks had been skimming money from half of the burials conducted in the first three years of its operating.

Result? By 1853 – just eight years after opening! – the cemetery went bankrupt.

Ownership of the land reverted back to Charles Salisbury Butler – who, by this point, had become the Liberal MP for Tower Hamlets.

Since he decided to keep running it on the cheap, by 1856 Victoria Park Cemetery became an object of multiple complaints about its disgraceful state. One quarter of cemetery was overflowing with bodies piled in common graves up to the surface and barely covered with gravel. The stench was unbearable. It was, quite literally, THE STINKY SQUISH OF CORPSES 2.0. (oh, believe me, you MUST read that article!)

After Butler’s death in 1870, the cemetery’s decline continued, until it was finally closed in 1876.

Fun fact: Butler lived (and died) at 48 Prince’s Gate, a grand building that serves today as the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates.

After its closure, Victoria Park Cemetery was simply left to rot. Hackney and Kingsland Gazette reported on 20 April 1887:

The present condition of the Victoria Park Cemetery, in the populous district of Bethnal Green, is a scandal which calls for public inquiry and condemnation. Walls have been demolished, and the headstones and mounds of thousands of graves broken down and removed, the whole extent of four or five acres having been reduced to barren and unseemly wreck and ruin. The mortuary chapel, in which the services of the dead were performed, has been literally pulled to pieces. One end is entirely demolished, the side walls partially torn down, the floor removed (…). The iron railings round the tombs have been everywhere carried away. (…)  Some of the graves have been broken open, and children have cast bricks onto the coffins. The place is reputed at night the resort of thieves and harlots*.

Such a truly grim picture!

*a lovely old-fashioned word for sex-workers

By the late 19th century, London was changing. In 1882, Lord Brabazon established the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association with a mission to transform disused burial grounds (closed in 1850s) into much-needed green spaces for London’s working-class communities.

Since any construction on them was illegal, they were worthless for landowners, so when Charles Butler’s son, Reverend John Banks Meek Butler, was approached with the idea of converting Victoria Park Cemetery into a public park, he agreed.

Turning Victoria Park Cemetery into a public park was held up for almost a decade – mainly due to lack of funds.

Work finally began in 1893, starting with the demolition of the chapels and removal of thousands of headstones. Some of the original trees were preserved, but the new design introduced wide open green spaces, a children’s playground, exercise facilities, and garden allotments. It took a year and 30 men to complete.

The task of landscaping the former cemetery fell to Fanny Wilkinson (1855–1951) – a true trailblazer! A suffragette and a graduate of the Crystal Palace School of Landscape Gardening and Practical Horticulture at a time when such classes were intended only for men, Fanny was Britain’s first paid, professional female landscape designer. She was responsible for over 75 public gardens across London, including Myatt’s Fields Park, Paddington Street Gardens and Vauxhall Park.

Meath Gardens was one of her biggest and most significant projects.

Of course, working with men in a male-dominated industry wasn’t always easy. As she once admitted for The Women’s Penny Paper (1890):

Often my customers prefer that their own men should work under me. This is often a stumbling block, since the gardeners occasionally imagine they know better, and they are often stupid and pigheaded. 

What a star!

In 1894, the cemetery was officially renamed Meath Gardens, after the Earl of Meath – it was actually Lord Brabazon, Chairman of the MPGA, who inherited the title.

Sadly, even in its new form, the space was still poorly maintained, and after a while, neglect crept back in…

(Seriously, was this place cursed or what?!)

By the 1950s, part of the abandoned park was repurposed for a chemical plant. In the 1960s, 1990s, and 2000s even more development projects carved away its borders, with many historic trees cut down on the way. 

In 2015, a group of Bethnal Green residents decided it was time to breathe new life into their park. They founded the Friends of Meath Gardens, rallying the local community to restore and care for the space.

A landscape strategy was developed, and soon, volunteers got to work – planting trees, shrubs, bulbs, keeping them watered and looking after the gardens. Their efforts didn’t go unnoticed. Soon, Meath Gardens went on to win a Green Flag Award, a Community Tree Planting Award, and a recognition for Community Engagement & Participation.

The woodland area in the southwest corner is even listed in the National Forest Inventory of England, and the goal now is to have it designated as a Site of Importance for Nature Conservation.

Meath Gardens are now a popular space used by schools, youth groups, fitness clubs, children, seniors and whole families. All the community planting days strengthen local ties, creating a sense of pride and belonging.

I visited the park in winter, hoping for something with Kensal Green vibe minus the gothic monuments.

What I found was… well, not much.

I wandered through the plain, muddy open space, trying to spot traces of Fanny Wilkinson’slandscaping… I’m not a fan of parks in general, but this one was rather… meh. Well, I enjoyed the woodland section, and the gorgeous large tree with gnarled branches located right in the park’s centre – an ancient Black Poplar, Britain’s rarest native timber tree, already growing in this spot when it became Victoria Park Cemetery.

The original brick wall still surrounds much of the park, and the Gothic entrance arch inscribed with “VPC 1845” was restored in 2018.

The only reminder of the 300,000 people buried here is a single crumbling headstone and a tiny memorial plaque hidden in the grass. Such a heartbreaking fate – especially that they are still down here, long forgotten, soaked into this grounds for ever.

Yes. The conversion into park didn’t involve removal of bodies.

Is 300,000 a lot?

Well, it’s more than the population of Brighton, and slightly less than the current population of Tower Hamlets Borough, where Meath Gardens belong.

So, I’d say yes, IT’S A LOT – and it includes about 230,000 of children.

While no famous names appear in its burial records, Victoria Park Cemetery holds deep historical and social significance. Beneath its soil lie thousands of long-forgotten poorest Victorian Londoners, who spent their miserable lives working long hours in sweatshops and factories – or turned into theft and prostitution instead. Many ended their days in workhouses, grim institutions for the elderly, orphaned and sick. Slum children weren’t spared either. Most of them died before reaching third birthday. The lucky survivors would start working as matchbox makers, errand runners or chimney sweeps by the age of 5. Girls would start selling their bodies at 12.

They all lived on the edge of survival, sheltering in damp, decaying slums, only to end up being laid to rest on top of one another in unmarked graves, with no ceremony or dignity.

One such story, found on FindAGrave.com, is that of MARY SHAW BLAKE (1793-1873) and her husband, WILLIAM HENRY BLAKE. Mary was a silk weaver, working on the second floor of their modest home at 6 (now 21) Cheshire Street. William, a master ornamental glasscutter, worked at Apsley Pellatt’s Falcon Flint Glass Works in Blackfriars. Decades of inhaling fine glass dust took a cruel toll – he died in 1868 of tongue cancer. Following his death, Mary ended up in the Bethnal Green Union Workhouse, where she passed away five years later. Both were buried in Victoria Park Cemetery – but in separate, unmarked graves. Just like so many others.

The only still remembered individual interred in Victoria Park Cemetery is BRIPUMYARRIMIN, also known as KING COLE – a member of the first Australian Aboriginal cricket team to tour England in 1868. Tragically, he died of tuberculosis and was buried in (surprise, surprise!) unmarked grave. Over a century later, in 1988, the Aboriginal Cricket Association planted a eucalyptus tree native to Australia in his honour and set a memorial plaque beside it. Sadly, the original tree died a few years ago, its stump can be seen next to the new one, planted by Friends of Meath Gardens.

While Bethnal Green was overwhelmingly poor area, there were also a few better-off families. The only remaining headstone in the entire cemetery commemorates women belonging to one of them, living at 75 Great Cambridge Street (now Queensbridge Road), Hackney Road. CONSTANCE HOW died in 1865 aged 18 years – Beloved by all who knew her, her suffering was long and intense but borne with the greatest patience. She shares the grave with mother Lucy (d. 1869) and sister Marian (d. 1876).

Three more residents of Victoria Park Cemetery should never be forgotten: HENRY HANSHARD (a young silk-weaver), ALEXANDER SHARP (a copper-plate printer), and JOSEPH WILLIAMS (a journeyman baker). They were key figures in Chartism, the 19th-century working-class movement fighting for political reform in Britain, focused on securing voting rights for all men – a cause that resonated deeply in the poorest East London. Persecuted for their activism, they all met tragic ends (Hanshard, for instance, died after being bludgeoned by three police officers) in 1848. Considered the Chartist martyrs, they were buried together, and their resting place was once marked by a nine-foot-tall stone shaft, topped with a Cap of Liberty, a powerful symbol of their fight for justice.

Of course, it was taken down in 1893.

I wonder why the How’s family headstone was spared…?

Even with people around, Meath Gardens has an eerie stillness, as if the forgotten souls of 300,000 Victorian East-Enders, soaked into this ground still linger beneath the picnic blankets and laughter of modern park-goers, with their stories lost to time. I believe the dead leave echoes of themselves behind, and Meath Gardens is thick with them.

I’d love to visit the park when it’s completely empty, to stand in that silence and just listen…

Maybe, as the usual sounds of London fade, an unsettling hush falls over the park – and from the direction of the playground, the faint creak of a swing can be heard… even though no one is there.

If I sat there alone, would I hear them? Muted whispers… or a baby’s cry?

Do parents sometimes hear an extra set of giggles as their children play there? Have toddlers ever described new friends they only meet at Meath Gardens – friends with peculiar, old-fashioned names like Bertie or Nellie…?

As I walked through, I couldn’t shake off the image of pale, sickly Victorian children – thin, dirty, dressed in rags – flitting like shadows between the trees. Maybe the laughter and joy of the living stir something deep within them – a yearning to once again be part of the world they were so cruelly discarded from?

The fact that there’s about 230,000 lost children buried here absolutely blows my mind. What’s even more heartbreaking is that there’s no memorial, not even a simple information board to acknowledge their existence. Honestly, don’t they deserve to be remembered?

Thankfully, the Friends of Meath Gardens recognise the historical significance of this place, and there are plans to install a fountain or an artwork to honour people laid to rest in Victoria Park Cemetery in the future.

And that’s the tragic story of forgotten grand Victorian cemetery of London – a business venture that flopped spectacularly and turned into an ordinary city park with a dark secret. The only remnant of its past is a single headstone.

The absence of Victoria Park Cemetery from any of my go-to books on the subject (not even a whisper in London’s hidden burial grounds by Bard & Miles, and barely a passing mention in Necropolis by Catharine Arnold!) feels like the final nail in its coffin.

And that silence speaks volumes.

Did you know about the eighth of London’s Magnificent Seven cemeteries?

Also, if anyone knows spooky stories about the lost children of Meath Gardens, you know where to find me…

MAIN SOURCES:
wikipedia.org
British Newspaper Archive
LONDON BURIAL GROUNDS by Isabella Holmes (1896)