Product Description

Offering information you will need to explore over fifty cemeteries to be found in the capital, this pocket guide includes information on where notable people are buried from Sid James to Karl Marx.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #43895 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 231 pages

Customer Reviews

Dead good
This is a fascinating look at some of the most overlooked but fascinating places in London: its cemeteries. Darren Beach has the essential qualities of a great guide book writer: he adores his subject, and he has a wonderful memory for obscure facts: if you want to find the graves of Bobby Moore, Dodi Fayed, the highwayman Claude Duval, Cunard of the Line, Palgrave of the Golden Treasury or the woman who sang the opening line of The Smith's song The Queen is Dead, you've come to the right place!

Beach visits fifty of the capital's most memorable burial grounds, from Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's, through the grand and gorgeous Victorian cemeteries like Highgate, Brompton and Kensal Green, to more modern sites such as Chingford Mount, last resting place of the Krays, and St. Pancras and Islington, the biggest cemetery in London and a place where you can quite literally get lost amongst the dead. With an encyclopaedic knowledge of both the rich and famous, and the obscure but intriguing, he provides a superb and comprehensive guide to historical sites, dead famous people and those who just have intriguing tombs. I've visited all the cemeteries he covers, but reading this book makes me just want to go and visit them all again.

The problem I do have with this book is its organisation. Cemeteries are divided into central, north, south, east, west and outer London, and are then listed alphabetically within these sections. There is a map at the front which shows the location of some of the cemeteries, but sadly there is no indication of the geographical boundaries of the sections - especially with so many cemeteries in north-west London, it's a confusion that could have been easily dealt with by expanding the contents over two pages so that the individual cemeteries could have been listed too.

I have some misgivings about the physical object too: the spine of my copy seems to be held together with lumps of glue, and tends to break rather than bend. I fear if it were carried about in a pocket for a while - as all guide books should be - it would just disintegrate.

But these are minor quibbles: I love this book, and am delighted to see that places I love are being shared with a new audience.

A surprise
I bought this book after a visit to the Courtauld House in south London. It begins with the story of how in the late 18th century there was nowhere to put the dead bodies. They ended up under the floorboards of churches and schools. So soon the great London cemeteries were constructed, accommodating thousands. But then they got full, and then soon nobody could remember the people buried there. So the graves had no visitors and the graveyards began to be unkempt and ignored.

If nothing else this book is a fascinating study of the nature of human time. In just 100 years the graveyards became terrible places with no care lavished on them and no remembrance of those buried inside. I don't know of anyone else who has looked at this subject with such a lightness of touch and skill. This is a great little book.

An Invaluable Guide
I am doing a personal photography project based on London's cemeteries, and this is undoubtedly the best guide I've found. It's small and compact and is full of very useful information, from the locations, descriptions and histories, to the stories behind some of the famous and not-so-famous monuments. I keep it in my camera bag for every trip.

There are a few inaccuracies though: such as saying (in the text for Old Mortlake Cemetery) that Charles Dickens is buried in Highgate West (although elsewhere in the book it says, correctly, that he's buried in Westminster Abbey).

It can also be misleading in places, especially when describing crematoria. The book doesn't point out that, where famous people have been cremated, very often there are no actual plaques or monuments for them, yet the way the book is written would lead you to suppose that there is something to actually 'see'.

The maps for the larger cemeteries are also to be taken as very loose guides - many hours have been lost trying to find prominent graves as marked on the maps, only for me to stumble upon them later by accident elsewhere. The map of Kensal Green has completely omitted the adjoining St Mary's Catholic Cemetery, despite including the road beyond it!.

If these minor issues could be ironed out, and maybe making it available in a spiral-bound edition that could withstand regular use a bit better, it would absolutely unbeatable.