History and Description
Founded as the General Cemetery of All Souls, Kensal Green, the cemetery was incorporated in 1832 (the year that profit-making cemeteries became legal) as a private company. It was the first of the 'Magnificent Seven' garden-style cemeteries in London. Kensal Green Cemetery was consecrated on 24 January 1833 by the Bishop of London. The Church of England was allotted 39 acres and the remaining 15, clearly separated, were given over to Dissenters, a distinction deemed crucial at the time. Originally there was a division between the Dissenters’ part of the cemetery and the Anglican section. This took the form of a ‘sunk fence’ from the canal to the gate piers on the path. There were also decorative iron gates. The small area designated for non-Anglican burials is approximately oval in shape and was formerly made prominent by a wider central axis path that terminated with the neo-classical chapel with curved colonnades. The Anglican Chapel dominates the western section of the cemetery, being raised on a terrace beneath which is an extensive catacomb; there is a hydraulic catafalque for lowering coffins into the catacomb.
The cemetery received its first funeral in January 1833. It is still in operation today; burials and cremations take place daily, although cremations are now more common than interments. Kensal Green Cemetery is still run by the General Cemetery Company under its original Act of Parliament. This mandates that bodies there may not be exhumed and cremated or the land sold for development. Once the cemetery has exhausted all its interment space and can no longer function as a cemetery, the mandate requires that it shall remain a memorial park. The General Cemetery Company constructed and runs the West London Crematorium within the grounds of Kensal Green Cemetery.
While borrowing from the ideals established at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris some years before, Kensal Green Cemetery contributed to the design and management basis for many cemetery projects throughout the British Empire of the time. In Australia, for example, The Necropolis at Rookwood (1868) and Waverley Cemetery (1877), both in Sydney, are noted for their use of the "gardenesque" landscape qualities and importantly self-sustaining management structures championed by the General Cemetery Company.
The cemetery is the burial site of approximately 250,000 individuals in 65,000 graves, including upwards of 500 members of the British nobility and 550 people listed in the Dictionary of National Biography. Many monuments, particularly the larger ones, lean precariously as they have settled over time on the underlying London clay.
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