Cemeteries in 1900 London: Kensal Green

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Arthur H. Beavan, writing in Imperial London, published in 1901, began his survey of London's cemeteries with this look at Kensal Green:

Kensal Green was the first established cemetery in London, and was in 1900 still the most important.

Covering more than eighteen acres, it stands on high ground, off the Harrow Road, two miles from Paddington.

There are two divisions - the smaller one for Nonconformists - beyond which, but unattached, is the large Roman Catholic burial-ground.

Each division is laid out in walks bordered with flowers, parterres, and oriental shrubs and conifers in landscape-gardening style.

The chapels are painfully plain in design, and the gloomy vaults and catacombs are such as are generally found in the older cemeteries.

Kensal Green cemetery is the Santa Croce of painters, musicians, actors, and in a more limited degree, legislators.

Here lie Eastlake, Balfe, Macready, Charles Mathews, Brunel, Siemens, Liston, Thackeray, Hood, Sydney Smith, Leech, Anthony Trollope, Shirley Brooks, Harrison Ainsworth, Alan Cunningham, Sir A. Cockburn, Sir W. Molesworth, Henry Russell of Cheer Boys Cheer fame, and others.

It is the Santa Croce also of conspicuous racing-men, such as the Marquis of Hastings, Fred Swindell, George Payne, Admiral Rous, Tom Wallace, etc.

(The original Tattersall - "Old Tatt," as he was called - lies in the burial-ground attached to St. George's, Hanover Square, in the Uxbridge Road.)

It is a cemetery remarkable for its ponderous memorials.

Tons of marble and stone must have been used for that of the Duke of Sussex and his sister Sophia; and the same may be said of others.

Many of these monstrous memorials are in bad taste, and even grotesque, but they were the fashion of their day, now supplanted by the simpler style of plain crosses looking down upon miniature parterres, etc.

Next: Sepulchral London in 1900: Brompton Cemetery