Brompton Cemetery
If you are going to have a day out, then make it to a place where people have been dying to get into for nearly two centuries. Make that trip to see one of the magnificent seven (and I’m not talking about Yul Brynner’s mob either).
And so, we did, and were standing outside the magnificent gates of Brompton Cemetery, one of the large Victorian era “new” cemeteries built to bury the dead from the ever-burgeoning population of nineteenth century London, that are now colloquially known as the “Magnificent Seven.”
It is the second of the seven we have visited, after a pre Covid times visit to Highgate Cemetery, the most famous of the seven. All morning on the way there, mentions of Brompton were being translated inside my head to Compton, and rewritten lyrics were forming: “Straight outta Brompton, crazy little toff named Tarquin, from the set called toffs drinking gin,” and “Jeremy’s his name and the toff’s coming straight outta Brompton.” (Well at least the gin would have an Ice Cube in it.) And being of a one-track mind, it was in my head all day.
What the grand frontage and entrance to the cemetery tries to indicate, but fails, is the sheer size and scale of the place. It is huge. We walked over five miles whilst there. It is home to (well, final resting place to) nearly two hundred thousand bodies, with tens of thousands of headstones and monuments and memorials. But it is the southwest corner that really drives home the size. On the other side of the railway which forms the western boundary of the cemetery is Stamford Bridge, the stadium of Chelsea Football Club, a behemoth in its own right, but which only has a footprint a fraction of the cemetery.
Unlike Highgate there aren’t regular guided tours, and the information centre is closed, and so we wander around without much of a plan.
There are a lot of people bumbling about in the cemetery, though most of them weren’t there to view the contents. Most of the people are there exercising in one form or another. There are cyclists, scooterists, dog walkers, and the joggers. Most of the latter look like they have either escaped from one of the graves or are heading to an early one.
Then there are the squirrels. Not squirrelly in the slightest. Lots of bold little blighters running up to you rather than away from you. And then stopping in front of you and looking directly at you, as if to ask, “where’s the food you were supposed to bring?” Not that king squirrel sat on the little bird box halfway up a tree needed any food. It looked as if he might have been eating a few of his brethren.
There are various sections in the cemetery where graves are grouped together. There is the fenced off section for Royal Guards, the Jewish section, the Catholic section, a heart-breaking children’s section, the Russian Orthodox section, the overgrown jungle like section, the section where all the monuments have been beheaded, the main Victorian money on Broadway and in the circle section, and against the north end of the east wall there is the Fanny section.
The final one is where nearly every headstone or monument has at least one person named Fanny on it. Which appeals to my juvenile sense of humour. And so, I have images of Cockney wide boys on a night out asking, “where the fanny is,” and being told to get themselves down to Brompton Cemetery as parts of it are full of Fanny’s.
There are a wide array of types of headstones and monument, and some come with their own bird. It isn’t a surprise to find a crow, cawing away, on top of a headstone, but it’s the pigeon on top of one that you need to watch out for. No one expects the harbinger of doom to be a pigeon, but it’s far more likely than it being a crow.
The southern end of the central Broadway had the magnificent classical colonnade and circle leading to the chapel (also sadly closed).
These were designed by Benjamin Baud in a style reminiscent of St Peter’s Square in Rome. The original architect (and the person who raised the funding and pushed for the required Act of Parliament for its go ahead) Stephen Geary was forced to resign after his initial design for it to appear as an outside Cathedral was deemed as too expensive and not grand enough to attract people to use it. Which does make you wonder what exactly the Victorians were looking for in a final resting place.
Without a guide or information, you can find ninety or so little silver circles on the ground in front of particular graves or monuments to highlight the occupants as someone famous or important. There was a blue plaque physically on one of the gravestones (but not a silver mark).
A lot of silver marks were against people neither of us had ever heard of, and so for us the silver marks were against no marks.
Two names we did recognise were one to Emmaline Pankhurst, leader of the Woman’s Suffragette movement. And Kit Lambert, erstwhile manager of The Who, in the family plot, which contained his father, Sir Constance, a composer and conductor of note.
There is an interesting mausoleum which is known as the time machine, yet no doctor is entombed there, and as we’ve already seen the link to The Who is elsewhere.
The other thing I did find were Abercrombie and Fitch. Although it does appear that Fitch was very much the superior partner in terms of tomb grandeur.
And a final one that made us do a double take. It’s difficult to see the worn little stem of the G on the monument below, it took several looks before we realised it wasn’t a C starting the name off.
With a lunch stop in the café on site we ended up spending three hours at the fascinating cemetery.
Two down, five to go.
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