Feature: Event - BLOOMSBURY FESTIVAL - The origin and evolution of London's cemeteries - Dr Roger Bowdler’s Tour of the Tombs, Sat' Oct' 23

Published: 21 October 2011
by JOSH LOEB

THE architects of the cemetery in what is now St George’s Gardens, Bloomsbury, wanted to “separate the dead from the living”. They failed. 

Today, under the feet of dog walkers, daydreamers and picnicking office workers – all very much alive – are around 50,000 skeletons. 

They include the remains of religious martyrs transported hundreds of miles to be decapitated and the probable victim of a miscarriage of justice.

In this pleasant patch of greenery close to Coram’s Fields, a church warden was caught stuffing bodies into bags in the 1770s – a scandalous crime, for which he was punished by being tied to a cart and whipped through the slum in St Giles while its waifs and urchins pelted him with rotten vegetables.

“The sexton was after the bodies for anatomical purposes, to sell to scientists,” says Dr Roger Bowdler, a Hampstead resident who is head of designation at English Heritage and will be leading a tour of the gardens this weekend. 

“Grave-snatching was a hated crime. The walk of shame through St Giles was a standard walk that malefactors would be made to do before being imprisoned.”

The gardens were designated a cemetery in 1715, when Bloomsbury would largely have been pasture land. This was the result of an Act of Parliament that ended the tradition of burials taking place in churchyards, leading to the creation of modern cemeteries – places not attached to churches.

“In the early 1700s only Jews, Quakers and non­conformists had cemeteries,” says Dr Bowdler. “Everyone else went into church­yards. Here, you’ve got the Church of England opening a purpose-built cemetery for the first time.”

The Act of Parliament had come into being because of the large number of churches being built at the time. Fifty new churches – including St George the Martyr in Queen Square and several Hawks­moors – were given land in the centre of town, but the land around them was recognised as being too expensive a resource to waste on the dead. It was sold for housing, and burial grounds for the new churches were created in what was then the edge of London.

“In Hampstead Road there is a place called St James’s Gardens, by that rather derelict hospital,” says Dr Bowdler. “That was the burial ground for St James in Piccadilly. In Camden Town there is a place called St Martin’s Garden off by Pratt Street. That was the burial ground for St Martin-in-the-Fields. This was a new way of bury­ing the dead that was quite different from what was being done in med­ieval times. It was about trying to separate the dead from the living.”

Among those who found their final resting place in St George’s Gardens was Eliza Flemming, a cook in Chancery Lane hanged in 1815 for poisoning a family.

“It was a real scandal at the time because everyone thought she was innocent and had been falsely accused by her employers,” says Dr Bowdler. “It’s said thousands of people flooded into the graveyard when she was being buried there as a mark of protest at the execution.”

Also buried in St George’s Gardens are a group of Mancunian Jacobites who were hanged, drawn and quartered on Kennington Common in 1746 and whose remains were sent to Bloomsbury for burial after their heads were sent to towns in the north of England.

“They were martyrs to the cause,” says Dr Bowdler. “There’s no monument to them. It’s an unusual place to find these Lancashire supporters of Bonnie Prince Charlie, but here they are.”

St George’s Gardens was closed as a cemetery in the 1850s and turned into a park in the 1880s. 

“They built new cemeteries on the outskirts of town – Highgate, Kensal Green – those kinds of places. These inner-town burial places were really over full, over crowded and too surrounded by the living.”

• Dr Roger Bowdler’s Tour of the Tombs (Saturday noon-1pm, at St George’s Gardens, Handel Street, WC1) is part of the Bloomsbury Festival. 0207 7130 350, www.bloomsburyfestival.org.uk