CS Knowledge Base

Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park is a historic cemetery, public park and local nature reserve in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets within the East End of London. It was one of the "Magnificent Seven" London cemeteries of the Victorian era, instigated because church burial plots had become overcrowded. The cemetery opened in 1841 and was originally named the City of London and Tower Hamlets Cemetery. It pre-dates the creation of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets in 1965 and instead took its name from the older Tower Hamlets division. It closed for burials in 1966.

Since 1990, it has been managed by the Friends of Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park charity, with the purpose of protecting, preserving and promoting this important space for conservation, heritage and community. Their work has supported various efforts, including the listing of monuments and grave research, biodiversity and natural environment management. The park is now a Metropolitan Site of National Importance for Nature Conservation. Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park today encompasses the original cemetery, bounded by historic walls, and additional pockets of land including the "Scrapyard Meadow" and the Ackroyd Drive Greenlink.

The park covers 33 acres (13 ha).^[1] The historic parish boundary between Mile End Old Town and Bromley-by-Bow runs north–south through the western side of the park, with Mile End to the west and Bromley-by-Bow to the east.^[a][2] The Main Gate of Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park is at its northwestern corner, at the intersection of Southern Grove road (which runs along the western edge of Cemetery Park) and Hamlets Way pedestrian path (which runs along the northern edge of the park). There are also smaller pedestrian gates along Hamlets Way and Cantrell Road where it meets with Bow Common Lane at the southwestern corner of the Cemetery Park, and with Knapp Road at the southern border of the park. The nearest London Underground tube stations are Mile End and Bow Road, and the nearest DLR station is Bow Church.

Before the Victorian era, all of London's dead were buried in small urban churchyards, which became so overcrowded and so close to where people lived, worked, and worshipped that they were causing disease and ground water contamination.

An act of Parliament^[which?] was passed which allowed joint-stock companies to purchase land and set up large cemeteries outside the boundaries of the City of London (a.k.a. the Square Mile). There were seven great cemeteries (the "Magnificent Seven") laid out about the same time (1832–41). Highgate Cemetery is the most well known, with hundreds of notable interments; the others are Nunhead, West Norwood, Kensal Green, Brompton and Abney Park.

The City of London and Tower Hamlets Cemetery Company was made up of eleven wealthy directors whose occupations reflected the industries of the day: corn merchant, merchant ship broker and ship owner, timber merchant, and Lord Mayor of the City of London. The company bought 27 acres (109,265 m²) of land in the parishes of Bromley St Leonard and Stepney St Dunstan.^[3] The cemetery was divided into a consecrated part for Anglican burials and an unconsecrated part for all other denominations.

Tower Hamlets Cemetery was formally consecrated by the Bishop of London Charles James Blomfield on Saturday 4 September 1841 prior to being opened for burials.^[4] The cemetery was consecrated in the morning; the first burial took place in the afternoon.^[5]

In the first two years 60% of the burials were in public graves and by 1851 this had increased to 80%. Public graves were the property of the company and were used to bury those whose families could not afford to buy a plot. Several persons, entirely unrelated to each other, could be buried in the same grave within the space of a few weeks. Allegedly some graves were dug 40 feet deep and contained up to 30 bodies. By 1889, 247,000 bodies had been interred.

In 1882 the Bow Cemetery Grievance Committee was formed due to the poor treatment of buried bodies and gravestones.^[6] During the Second World War the cemetery was bombed five times during raids on the City of London; both cemetery chapels were damaged^[7] and shrapnel damage can be seen on the graves by the Soanes Centre in the north-west corner of the park.

In November 1959, Stepney and Poplar councils requested that the Minister of Housing and Local Government appoint a person to inspect the condition of the cemetery which had concerned them for many years.^[2] In May 1961, Stepney Council agreed to work with Poplar Council and the London County Council to gain the powers necessary to convert part of the cemetery into a public open space.^[8] Burials continued taking place until 1966. The Greater London Council bought the company for £100,000 under the Greater London Council (General Powers) Act 1966 (c. xxviii) and the ground was closed for burials.

The intention was to create a public park and relevant parts of the cemetery were freed from the effects of consecration. In October 1967, a further £125,000 was spent clearing the chapels and 0.68 acres (2,752 m²) of graves. Strong local opposition and problems of funding stopped the clearance. Tower Hamlets London Borough Council took over the ownership of the park in 1986. In November 1987, the cemetery was designated as a conservation area.^[9]

The site has been managed as a public park, historical cemetery and local nature reserve by the Friends of Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park, since they became a UK-registered charity in 1990.^[10] The Friends have maintained and developed the site's unique conservation, heritage and community value. Their work has transformed the site into a Local Nature Reserve and a Metropolitan Site for the Importance of Nature Conservation. The site has also retained a Green Flag Award (Community) since 2012.^[11]

The Friends of Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park is an independent charity established in 1990, to preserve, protect and celebrate the site's important role in conservation, heritage and community. The charity's main objective is to encourage greater use of this inner urban green space as a sanctuary for people and a place of biodiversity. The Friends manage the park under a service-level agreement with Tower Hamlets Council.^[12]

There are two buildings within the Cemetery Park, both towards the north-western corner of the site. The Cemetery Park Lodge is a 1930s building, originally built as a residence for the Cemetery groundskeeper. The Soanes Field Centre was opened in 1993 as an education and ecology studies centre.

The Cemetery Park was declared a Local Nature Reserve in May 2000, along with adjacent open land on Cantrell Road ("Scrapyard Meadow") and Ackroyd Drive ("Ackroyd Drive Greenlink").^[13][14] It has been designated as a Site of Metropolitan Importance for Nature Conservation. Two sections of the high brick walls which surround Cemetery Park (the west wall, including its gates and gate piers.^[15] and the east wall^[16]) are on the Historic England national register of listed buildings, as are seven individual monuments; all nine listings are Grade II.^[17] Though filled with gravestones and funerary monuments, the cemetery has been allowed to revert to resemble a natural woodland, with many wildflowers, birds, and insect species found in the park. There are several trails and walks created by the Friends of Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park.^[18]

The park is open 24 hours per day, although the Main Gate on Southern Grove is locked at dusk. Smaller foot gates around the park remain open for access.

Those who are buried or have memorials here include:

• Charlie Brown: popular publican of Charlie Brown's, Limehouse for 40 years, his 1932 funeral brought 16,000 mourners to the cemetery^[19]
• Major John Buckley VC: soldier and one of the first recipients of the Victoria Cross, for his bravery in the Indian Rebellion of 1857; living in relative "poverty and obscurity" at the time of his death, he was laid to rest in an unmarked grave, located in 2012 through research by a Friend of the Cemetery Park,^[20] and marked with a headstone in a 2014 ceremony^[21]
• Zilpha Elaw, African-American preacher and spiritual autobiographer^[22]
• Robert McLachlan: early entomologist^[23]
• Henry Norris: civil engineer who began his career with repairs to the then Eddystone Lighthouse and later on supervised the construction of the first lighthouse in the world to be designed and built for an electric light powered by alternating current
• John Northey: died in the Princess Alice disaster in 1878
• Hannah Maria Purcell: widow of William Purcell, carpenter of HMS Bounty
• John "White Hat" Willis: son of John "Jock" Willis (known as Old Stormy Willis), founder of Jock Willis Shipping Line (a company that owned, among others, the Cutty Sark)

Burial monuments listed by Historic England:

• Tomb of Sarah Morris (unknown date) and George Morris (died 1843)^[24]
• Tomb of Samuel Weddell (died 1845); monument includes inscription noting that Weddell had left UK£100 (equivalent to $12,500 in 2023) "to the company called the City of London and Tower Hamlets Cemetery", to be invested and used for perpetual upkeep of the monument^[25]
• Tomb of John Smith (died 1846)^[26]
• Tomb (of unknown individual, died c. 1850) to east of Tomb of John Smith^[27]
• Tomb of Ellen Llewellyn (died 1854),^[28] including Dr Rees Ralph Llewellyn, who performed the autopsy on Mary Ann Nichols, considered the first victim of Jack the Ripper
• Tomb of Ellen Wiskin (died 1866)^[29]
• Tomb of Joseph Westwood (died 1883); noted in the Historic England listing as the cemetery's "most imposing monument",^[30] the burial site includes his son, Joseph Westwood Jr, both of whom were involved in shipbuilding and engineering^[31][32]

Others:

• Some victims of the 1940 Bethnal Green Disaster
• Monument to children who were in the care of the charity of Thomas Barnardo, and were buried elsewhere in the cemetery in unmarked graves^[33]
• Graves of the Charterhouse Brothers, Carthusian monks who lived in the London Charterhouse
• French graves, French workers who came to London to help refine gold from the Australian gold rushes, the Rothschilds had already been refining gold in Paris
• Poplar civilian war memorial, to those who died in Poplar during the The Blitz, made of bricks from damaged properties
• The War Memorial, located near the entrance on Southern Grove

There are 279 Commonwealth service personnel of both World Wars buried here, the names of all being listed on bronze panels on a screen wall memorial in the Mile End section of the park near the entrance on Southern Grove, as are those of four Dutch merchant seamen. Nine British merchant seamen are buried here who were killed when their ship, SS Bennevis, was hit by a high explosive bomb on 7 September 1940, while berthed in the West India Docks, during an air raid in World War II.^[7][34]

• Official website
• Tower Hamlets Council (Parks and Open Spaces) website
• Aerial view from 1934, from the English Heritage "Britain from Above" archive