Just behind the Foundling Hospital in Bloomsbury is one of London’s key funerary landscapes: the twin burial grounds of two Anglican churches, now known as St George’s Gardens.

The “Fifty Churches Act” of 1711 called for the creation of new places of worship in the fast-expanding capital and the need for new graveyards was even greater. Modern ideas about separating the dead from the living were gaining ground, advocating a Roman model of extra-mural burial. The first new cemetery - detached from any church - was here. Nicholas Hawksmoor, no less, oversaw the construction of the walls.

Initially Londoners were slow in adapting to this new-fangled practice, but the burial in 1715 of a well-known religious writer named Robert Nelson broke the sepulchral ice. By the mid-18th century thousands were being interred here every year and around 50,000 burials in total took place in this rectangular enclosure. The subterranean residents here include a dozen English Jacobites, hanged drawn and quartered in 1746, Eliza Fenning, a 20-year-old cook wrongly hanged in 1815 after being accused of poisoning her employers, the anti-slavery campaigner Zachary Macaulay (d. 1838) and legion other Londoners of all classes.

In this tour Roger Bowlder will introduce you to this evocative and memory-laden site - the earliest deliberate Anglican cemetery.

Tickets £12. Please click here to purchase.

ROGER BOWDLER
Tomb historian Roger Bowdler did a PhD at Cambridge on macabre 17th century church monuments. Way back in the 90s he presented a piece on ‘The Sculpture of Fear’ for BBC2’s One Foot in the Past. His career has been in conservation, working for English Heritage/Historic England (where he was in charge of listing) and more recently as a partner in the firm of Montagu Evans. He has written short books on churchyards and war memorials, lots of articles, and is at work on a book about British Cemeteries from 1820. X