7: Kensal Green Cemetery

Harrow Road, London, W10 4RA
www.kensalgreencemetery.com
Visited on Wednesday 19 December 2012

I have always been fascinated by what goes on behind the ‘presented’ parts of London. Those narrow back streets or railway yards or waste grounds that you don’t see from the main road seem to have an air of dilapidated and abandoned beauty to them. If you don’t know what I mean, try taking a train on the London Overground. As the name implies, this is a set of routes that make up the London suburban network and most of the stations and lines are above ground. It was established in the mid-2000s more as an exercise in branding than anything else, bringing together existing services operated by a disparate group of rail companies by giving the stations consistent signage. As of 9 December this year, the network has been fully joined up, and is largely located in Zone 2, allowing you to travel horizontally across London in a way that’s not really serviced by the Underground. Trains snake their way past ordinary people’s back gardens and round the back of big buildings, taking the traveller on a journey through the unglamorous, functional parts of town. Tube trains rumble beneath these areas too, and buses crawl along the traffic-heavy main roads but it is only really on the Overground that you get to see London backstage.

I had never been to Kensal Rise before, though it’s only 25 minutes on the train from Dalston Junction. The destination was Kensal Green Cemetery, one of London’s ‘Magnificent Seven’ cemeteries built in the 1830s and 40s. I’d first read about these in a book called ‘Necropolis’ by Catharine Arnold, which details the history of London and its dead since Roman times. By the late 1820s, London’s inner-city burial grounds were becoming dangerously overcrowded. Graves were being dug that already contained bodies, and there were stories of corpses being flushed into the sewer system. Decaying matter in the drinking water of the living led to epidemics and Something had to be done. In 1832 Parliament passed a bill encouraging privately-owned and run cemeteries to be established outside the city and over the next decade seven were built: Kensal Green, West Norwood, Highgate, Abney Park (in Stoke Newington), Nunhead, Brompton and Tower Hamlets.

Suspicious man with umbrella and brass pig

Kensal Green was set up in 1833 by the General Cemetery Company, which still runs it today, and was inspired by the Pere-Lachaise cemetery in Paris. According to Ms Arnold’s book, cemeteries like this were known as the Great Gardens of Sleep. They were large, landscaped areas with carefully planted trees and pathways laid out so that both mourners and the general public could stroll around at a dignified remove from the departed and without actually stepping on their final resting places. They were also profit-making businesses, and interment in the catacombs or the erection of a mausoleum could cost a small fortune. While burial was still the preferred method of dealing with a body, the Magnificent Seven enjoyed roaring trade – if you’re in the business of death, you’re hardly going to run out of customers. However, by the early 1900s cremation started to become fashionable, as several high profile celebrities, including a member of the Royal Family (Princess Louise, Duchess of Connaught), were disposed of this way. The trend gathered momentum throughout the 20th century, and this spelled bad news for the cemetery companies that hadn’t moved with the times, or didn’t have the room to install a crematorium on site. As a result several of them went out of business and fell into disrepair – Abney Park and Highgate are both examples of this. These days they exist not only as places that contain monuments to the dead, but also as monuments themselves – to that particular Victorian way of memorialising the deceased with lavish headstones, sepulchral statues and grandiose tombs. Thankfully both cemeteries have been taken over by local councils and are looked after by volunteers who keep the pathways clear, and maintain the organised chaos of fallen stones covered with ivy and swaths of undergrowth and now mature trees that provide a home for many species of birds and other wildlife. Nature has no respect for our forgotten and long-unvisited graves it seems.

The owners of Kensal Green got with the programme however and established the West London Crematorium within the cemetery grounds in 1939, although business there had remained fairly healthy owing to the patronage of the place by the rich and famous from the start. It is still a working cemetery, and there are cremations and burials every day. I was interested to see it as several famous people are buried there (including Harold Pinter, William Makepeace Thackeray and Anthony Trollope), and the catacombs are the biggest and most prestigious in London. Some of the more ostentatious structures are actually listed buildings in themselves, and there is a large area set aside for Dissenters. (They were people who separated themselves from the Anglican Church in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, forming alternative Christian groups, some of whom sound like they’re straight out of a Harry Potter novel – for example Muggletonians, Seekers and Ranters).

Juice and nicely proportioned but somewhat dry Chelsea bun

Brother Neil and I decided to meet up for lunch and cake before our visit to the cemetery, and chose Minkies Deli, which is right next to Kensal Rise station. It’s a curious building, consisting of one room with glass walls on three sides, perched on a grass bank. I arrived first and secured a table, at which I was rather annoyingly joined by one of those middle aged men you see in North London who you suspect might be an intellectual celebrity – a university professor you’ve seen on a history documentary, or an archaeology expert consulted on the news or something. Anyway, he flapped his copy of the Guardian all over the table and huffed and puffed while I tucked in to my pre-lunch treat of a delicious vegetable juice (containing apple, ginger, orange, beetroot and carrot) and an endearingly small Chelsea bun. This was disappointingly dry and I began to worry about the place as the rather calamitous waitress proceeded to drop some crockery that smashed into very noisy smithereens on the floor, and several people called over that they had not received their coffee and had been waiting ten minutes. Can you imagine.

Thankfully Brother Neil showed up after a short time, with some salacious gossip to share and a positive attitude towards the rather splendid-looking sandwich menu.

Halloumi, pesto and rocket on white sourdough (Brother Neil)

‘I need carbs. It’s somewhat oily, owing to the pesto, but this is a very pleasing combination of flavours. The halloumi is moist. I’ll give it an 8.’

Avocado, tuna and boiled egg on ciabatta (thepateface)

‘This is a great idea, but there is a major problem involving temperature inconsistency – the egg is really cold, as if it’s straight out of the fridge, while the other ingredients are warm and mushy like baby food. Also, it’s a bit oily. However it’s pretty delicious if you try not to look at it. 7 out of 10.’

By this point we’d moved away from Mr Possible Prof to another table where a very nice old lady was reading a book and clearly very much enjoying her plate of chicken with cous cous and veg. We agreed that this looked really tasty, and also that we were still hungry after our sarnies. I was tempted by the very good-looking home made sausage rolls, but then we spotted The Brownie. The slightly starey other waitress told us it was triple choc and that we should treat ourselves, but frankly we didn’t need too much persuasion. There were also some super cute tiny mince pies, and I was sure I knew who might like one of those…

Cakes for beings of all sizes

Oh, Sure

Divine brownie

Triple-chocolate brownie (Brother Neil and thepateface, a slice each)

‘OMG, this is … DIVINE. It’s not cakey or crumbly, but rather is moist, almost like chocolate mousse. One of the best I’ve ever had,’ was BN’s feeling on the matter, and I concurred wholeheartedly. The first 10 out of 10 of the culturecake project!

Little mince pie (Sure)

‘…’

(he doesn’t say much, but we could tell he was very pleased)

At £20 for the entire lunch, including my rather naughty pre-lunch starter, we thought this was very reasonable and would definitely recommend this funny little deli if you’re in the area. They do breakfast and lunch as well.

After all that, we decided to steel ourselves against the rain and actually go and do the cultural thing we’d come here for. The cemetery itself is about a ten-minute walk from Kensal Rise station, and is sandwiched between the fairly busy Harrow Road and the Grand Union Canal. Of course when it was first opened, it would have had a much grander vibe to it, being on the edge of the city and away from the hubbub of central London. Nowadays there’s something quite pitiful about it. It feels like it’s been crammed in behind and between everything else, in one of those dead spaces that nobody would otherwise be interested in – the kind that you see from an Overground train. We entered through the big wrought-iron gates set in a stone arch, and the first things we noticed were two big green wheely bins with KGC scrawled on the side, a Total petrol station and Sainsbury’s visible through the leaf-less trees and, beyond the rather seedy canal, the big circular frames of the derelict Kensal Gas Works. It was muddy and drizzling and by this time also getting rather dark, and we clearly did not have suitable footwear.

Gasworks

Sodden and wonky graves

Possibly the best surname ever

Statue

We noticed quite a number of graves of people who’d died young – under the age of 40. Many of the graves had those creepy oval photographs fixed to the headstone depicting in life the occupant now below. Though some of the graves had evidently been visited recently and were adorned with garish plastic flowers or corny rhyming poems covered with cellophane, many had not, and almost all of them in this section were lopsided, the stone sinking into the soil. I always like to look at the euphemisms for death that people put on gravestones, and found my favourite one yet, which substituted ‘sunrise’ and ‘sunset’ for ‘born’ and ‘died’. It was raining by now and almost unbearably cold and we realised that this was not really the ideal day for a pleasant walk around this place. We soldiered on towards the central chapel, past some really impressive mausolea and grand headstones, eventually finding our only famous person of the day – Princess Sophia, the daughter of George III. On the other side of the chapel (which seemed actually to be abandoned) was another section containing much smarter looking graves that were evidently on more solid ground and not leaning in the melancholy fashion of the first ones we had come across. However, there was no time to explore this bit properly because it was 3.40pm and we didn’t want to get locked in when the cemetery closed at 4…

Tomb of Princess Sophia

Obligatory crows in trees

Sturdier resting places

WHOM?!

The day ended with a couple of wines in a rather strange pub called the Chamberlayne, opposite Minkies. It gradually filled up as we chatted, with a curious collection of characters, almost all men, and we had the sensation that we might have stumbled onto a David Lynch film set. We did spot a living celeb – much to Brother Neil’s delight, the actor who played Vince in the 1990s British TV series Queer as Folk came in to buy some carry-out beers.

On the whole I would recommend Minkies as a destination in itself, as they seem to have a good menu, though I imagine it is quite busy at the weekends, as there is only space for about 15 people to sit and eat. Kensal Green cemetery is definitely worth a visit, though not on a wet and cold December day. I suspect that in the spring and summer this is a rather lovely place to wander around, when it probably seems much less desolate and dreary than we found it!

Minkies