Necropolis: London & it's Dead (19 page)

Geary was born on 31 August 1797 to Stephen and Ann Geary of Dean’s Yard, Westminster. Geary Senior ran a coffee-shop for the boys of Westminster School. Geary Junior was apprenticed at fourteen to Thomas Leverton, an architect and surveyor in St Pancras. A great Victorian inventor and entrepreneur, Geary subsequently took out patents for artificial fuel, waterworks, street-paving and a prototype fire escape–identical to those still used on New York brownstones. Geary also designed one of London’s first public houses–the Bell in Pentonville Road–and London’s first ‘gin palace’, which opened near Aldgate in 1830. With their handsome plates of ground glass, blazing gaslight, shiny mahogany counters and buzz of activity reflected in glittering mirrors, this British institution appears the antithesis of a cemetery. However, in terms of scale and influence, the gin palace performed a similar function, dominating the land of the living, particularly London, as surely as the cemetery set a precedent for the burial of the dead. In architectural terms, the gin palace and the elaborate Neo-gothic graveyard had much in common. One marked a gathering place for the living, the other, a gathering place for the dead. Later in life, Geary became a militant teetotaller, remorseful for contributing to the misery of alcoholism.

Geary’s move into cemetery design was timely. For all his
inventiveness and creativity, he lacked a sound business sense and had come to grief over two previous commissions. The first had been for a prototype shopping mall, dubbed the ‘Royal Panarmonion’. The specification included pleasure gardens, billiard rooms and a theatre, all crammed into a site near the Gray’s Inn Road, with a projected cost of £50,000. The prospectus, published in 1829, stated that £20,000 would be raised from the sale of bonds, and the project would receive royal support from the Prince Regent, George IV–which lent a certain cachet to the scheme. But within two years the Panarmonion foundered, the uncompleted structure was demolished and Geary was made bankrupt.

Geary’s next move was a new police station at Battle Bridge, near Euston Road. St Pancras was not the most salubrious of districts, so the idea of a police station was welcome. However, this was to be no ordinary police station. It was to support a huge monument, forty feet high, representing St George killing the dragon. Already approved by the Metropolitan Commissioners for Roads and the Metropolitan Police, the building would be called St George’s Cross, in honour of the Prince Regent. Unfortunately, George IV died long before the monument was completed and the project was renamed King’s Cross in honour of William IV.

Situated slap bang in the middle of an important junction of the roads now known as Euston, Pentonville and Gray’s Inn, the monument was a constant hazard to traffic. The Vestry of St Pancras threatened demolition if it was not lit properly. By 1835, the building was already too small to be an efficient police station and, George IV having been dead five years, there was still no statue of him on top. As a result of his bankruptcy, Geary’s project was not seen as a sound investment, so he was short of funds to complete it. The eventual statue was a pathetic, eleven-foot-high concrete echo of what might have been. Then the police moved out, and the lower section of the monument became a beer shop. After complaints that this represented a public nuisance, with scenes of binge-drinking and anti-social behaviour, seventy local residents petitioned for the
shop’s closure. The monument was unceremoniously demolished in February, 1845. The best that can be said of this unfortunate episode is that Geary’s legacy lives on in the name he gave to the district: King’s Cross. The success of the London Cemetery Company must have been a considerable comfort in the context of such ignominious failure.
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Geary’s partner, James Bunstone Bunning (1802–63), had also played his part in creating the very fabric of Victorian London. As well as being surveyor to the London Cemetery Company, he was also responsible for Holloway Prison (1852) and Billingsgate Market(1853). Bunning was also surveyor of the Foundling Hospital Estates and a member of the Board of the Foundling Hospital in Coram Fields. Many of the young children from the hospital were buried in Highgate, their grave markers bearing only initials.
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The London Cemetery Company soon acquired the first plot of land at Highgate. The remaining twenty acres of the Ashurst Estate were purchased for £3,500. Allowing for verges and decent space between each grave, there would be room for 30,000 graves. Each grave, on average, contained three bodies. Sold at the lowest figure of £2 10s per body, the gross yield would be at least £225,000. The LCC was offering ‘luxury burial’ in a prime spot.

In June 1836, at the first meeting of the shareholders of the London Cemetery Company, Stephen Geary announced to cheers that Highgate would not only rival all other cemeteries but, as a suburban ornament, would be an honour to the whole country.
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Geary’s main competitor was Kensal Green and he knew from the outset that Highgate had to be different. The sloping expanses of the old orchard must have winding walks and different levels. There should be outstanding features that made Highgate unique, something spectacular that would persuade the well-to-do to invest.

In his capacity as founder, chairman and architect of the London Cemetery Company, Geary could act as his own client. His task was to design the cemetery, and he did so in his own idiosyncratic way. While he may have been inspired by the
commercial
success of Kensal Green, Geary was determined to use the most progressive architec
tural style of the day–which he then imposed on a Classical model. Two chapels flank a gateway on Swain’s Lane, which bears the words
LONDON CEMETERY
and features impressive iron gates. The twin chapels (one for Anglicans, one for Dissenters), situated on either side of the entrance, comply with the Classical rules of symmetrical design. The curved walls enclose the entrance fore-court in the same way as those at Blenheim and Castle Howard. However, once the Classical layout was
in situ
, Geary was free to play around with his own interpretation of Gothic Revival, one which can only be described as ‘Tudorbethan’. The octagonal chapels feature spiral staircases, stained-glass bay windows, lancet windows (as used by archers to repel invaders), steep gables and bristling pinnacles.
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Geary’s original plans incorporated St Michael’s Church, with an entrance leading directly from the church grounds into the cemetery. The Dissenters’ Chapel was situated in the centre of the grounds, connected by a tunnel to the entrance path in the foreground. ‘Dwellings for officers’ and a terrace with catacombs also featured. The plan was abandoned when David Ramsay was appointed landscape gardener. Together, he and Geary created a picturesque landscape of avenues and plantations intersected by winding gravel paths, reminiscent of those at Père Lachaise, ingeniously leading from one level to the next without any need for steps, thus performing the dual function of allowing easy access to the graves, while also creating an illusion of spaciousness in the cemetery’s twenty acres. The architectural historian Niklaus Pevsner praised Ramsay’s ‘remarkably successful landscaping, the circuitous roads winding about the acclivity’. Another entrance was built adjoining St Michael’s, but it was not authorized by the Church, and the Bishop of London ordered it to be closed.

Geary now created a magnificent series of features intended to confirm Highgate’s reputation as London’s principal cemetery. The first of these, the Egyptian Avenue, pandered to the craze for Egyptiana inspired by the funereal specimens brought back to the
British Museum by nineteenth-century explorers such as Giovanni Battista Belzoni (1778–1823), a circus Strong Man turned tomb raider. Belzoni was an adventurer, motivated by profit, whose destructive methods of excavation horrified genuine antiquaries. His treasures went to the British Museum, courtesy of Consul General, Henry Salt. In 1821, his finds were exhibited in Piccadilly to a gaw-ping public, and made a dramatic impact on all aspects of fashion. Sèvres created an entire ‘Egyptian’ dinner service, while Thomas De Quincey, in an opium-induced trance, dreamed of meeting Isis and Osiris and being ‘buried for a thousand years in stone coffins, with mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids’.
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Egyptiana offered magnificent potential for memorial art. It seems appropriate that the Victorians, with their fascination with mortality, should turn for inspiration to another culture that was equally obsessed by death, and incorporate the pagan symbolism of Egypt into the familiar rituals of Anglican burial.

The Egyptian Avenue is essentially a street of the dead, created by excavating twelve feet deep into the steepest part of the hillside. One enters beneath a colossal arch, flanked by columns featuring a lotus-bud motif and leading to a tunnel. The dead were interred in a line of sixteen family vaults, which resemble a street of terraced houses. Each vault was brick-lined, with enough shelf-room for twelve coffins. In front of each door was an inverted torch–the symbol of life extinguished. ‘As we enter the massive portals’, wrote William Justyne in his
Guide to Highgate
, 1865 ‘…and hear the echo of our footsteps intruding on the awful silence of this cold, stony, death-palace, we might also fancy ourselves treading through the mysterious corridors of an Egyptian temple.’

Beyond the Egyptian Avenue stood a huge Cedar of Lebanon, an original feature of the Ashurst garden, already over 150 years old when Geary was planning the cemetery. He constructed a circle of twenty catacombs around the tree, each with an Egyptian-style pediment. These were so popular that forty years later an outer circle of sixteen was constructed facing into the circle.

Above the Circle of Lebanon was Highgate’s third great feature, the Terrace catacombs, which consisted of an underground gallery beneath the terrace; it was more than 80 yards long and contained 840 recesses, each big enough to take a single coffin. Known as
loculi
, the catacombs were roofed with asphalt and featured glass apertures, which admitted light into the tombs below.
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The London Cemetery Company’s North London or Highgate Cemetery was consecrated to St James on Monday, 20 May 1839 by the Right Reverend Charles James Bloomfield, Lord Bishop of London. In accordance with the London Cemetery Act of 1836, several acres were left unconsecrated for the burial of Dissenters. Unlike Kensal Green, the Dissenters were not singled out as second-class citizens, but discreetly screened by a row of chestnut trees.

The establishment of a cemetery at Highgate was strongly opposed by local residents, who did not welcome this ‘great garden of sleep’ in their midst. The development was viewed with distaste by a community anxious to maintain its distance from the Modern Babylon creeping up the hill. But, once they had seen the flowers, trees, and ‘quiet seclusion’, residents applied to purchase keys, which conferred the privilege of walking in the cemetery whenever they pleased.
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Soon Highgate Cemetery was a tourist attraction in its own right:

No cemetery near London can boast so many natural beauties. The irregularity of the ground, rising in terraces, the winding paths leading through long avenues of cool shrubbery and marble monuments…In the genial summertime, when the birds are singing blithely in their leafy recesses, and the well-cared-for graves are dazzling with the varied hues of beautiful flowers, there is a holy loveliness upon this place of death.
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In 1855, fifteen years after the consecration of Nunhead, its second cemetery, in south-east London, the London Cemetery Company
opened its third, and last, cemetery. This was not in East London, as originally planned, but consisted of a nineteen-acre extension to Highgate on the eastern side of Swain’s Lane.

The New Ground originally formed part of the estate of Harry Chester, President of the Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution and a leading light of Highgate. The New Ground, or Eastern Cemetery, was enclosed and laid out with winding lanes, and connected with the Old Ground, or Western Cemetery, by a tunnel running beneath Swain’s Lane. A coffin lift meant that caskets could be lowered from the chapels down into the tunnel and conveyed to the New Ground across the road.

Although part of the cemetery was set aside for foundlings, Highgate was never a cemetery for the poor. One of Mayhew’s Spitalfields tailors, earning one penny an hour in the 1850s, would have found it impossible to pay £2 10s for a common grave, or £21 for a family-sized brick grave, accommodating twelve coffins.

Evidence of the cemetery’s profitability is revealed in the St Pancras Vestry Minutes of 1839, when the London Cemetery Company appealed against the rateable assessment. The company said the eventual value of the plots, vaults and catacombs could be £150,000; however, their income to date was only £1,000. The LCC maintained that it was not the
owner
of the sold plots–the occupiers and their families were–and therefore the LCC could not be rated on them, only on the profits. The LCC won its appeal.
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Famous residents of Highgate Cemetery include Julius Beer, a German immigrant who made a fortune on the London Stock Exchange and became proprietor of the
Observer.
As a tradesman and a Jew, although he converted to Anglicanism, Beer was never accepted in elitist London society. However, his monument, which dominates Highgate Cemetery, delivers a colossal rebuff. Four years before his death, Beer purchased the plot for £800, stumping up a further £5,000 for a mausoleum designed by George Oldrid Scott, who had taken over the practice of his father, George Gilbert Scott.

Built by a team of Italian masons, the mausoleum contains a
life-sized white Carrara marble sculpture of young Ada Beer, the daughter who predeceased him aged eight years, being raised to her feet by a tall angel, stooping gracefully beneath the weight of its wings. Beer’s wife and brother are also buried here, as is his son Frederick, a depressive, who married Rachel Sassoon, cousin of Siegfried. Rachel owned the
Sunday Times
and was devoted to the melancholy Frederick, even going to the length of having the family crest clipped into the coat of his favourite poodle in an effort to entertain him–to no avail.
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