A modern place

It’s difficult for us today, when cemeteries are old and crumbling, to realise how new-fangled they were in the early nineteenth century. They were a novel private solution to a very public problem: how to dispose of the dead of the burgeoning metropolis?

Until the 1850s most burials took place in church graveyards, close to the homes of the bereaved, but these were not secure. There were regular scandals as the bodies of the dead were subjected to appalling indignities. They might be stolen by body snatchers to provide raw materials for the schools of anatomy, or be uncovered by rain if they were buried too close to the surface. Their coffins might be broken up and the lead, wood, and metal fittings sold. Or they might simply have been dismembered and rearranged to take up the least possible amount of room.

Clearly something had to be done, and the idea of civic improvement combined with the opportunity to make a profit led to the establishment of private cemetery companies. They promised good returns to shareholders, their advertisements appearing on the same pages of the newspapers as those seeking investment in the new railway companies. Indeed, the first intercity train line from London to Birmingham was being built at the same time as Highgate Cemetery. They were each as modern as the other in the public mind. On the hoardings of one new cemetery a wag added ‘New graves warmed by steam’.

The earliest of the great nineteenth-century joint-stock cemeteries around London was built by the General Cemetery Company at Kensal Green, and the first burial took place there on 31 January 1833. Within three months, before its success could even begin to be judged, the architect Francis Goodwin (1784-1835) had announced plans to set up another company to establish a cemetery at Highgate. Like practically every other new cemetery of the time it was claimed to be modelled on Père- Lachaise in Paris. However, obsessed with working on his competition entry for the new houses of parliament, Goodwin seems to have made little progress on his Highgate project and he died in 1835 of apoplexy brought on it is thought by the pressure of work.

THE LONDON CEMETERY COMPANY

It was not until 1836 that renewed attempts were made to establish a cemetery at Highgate. Although a number of the same people were involved, this time the proponent was Stephen Geary (1797-1854), also an architect. He had been among the unsuccessful competitors in the Kensal Green competition of 1831 and, like Goodwin, he must have decided that he stood a better chance of getting to design a cemetery if he founded the company to build it. He set up The London Cemetery Company (LCC) which planned to establish not just one cemetery but three: north, south and east of London. Investors were tempted with mentions of ‘the realization of large profits’ by those cemeteries already established and the expectation that ‘this Company must insure very large returns for the capital invested’. It was incorporated by Act of Parliament on 17 August 1836, at that time the only way of giving it perpetual succession distinct from its members apart from a Royal Charter. It had a capital of £100,000 in 5,000 shares of £20 each.

The site of about 20 acres on the slope of Highgate hill had been purchased early in 1836, as well as another of similar size at Peckham for the southern cemetery. The Company was empowered to acquire up to 50 acres in each of the three districts, but the anticipated eastern cemetery never materialized.