Like many people, from childhood days onward, I have always been intrigued and disquieted by cemeteries, and other places where the dead are evoked or commemorated. However, I only became seriously interested in the subject in the mid1990s, when after researching and writing a number of studies on urban parks, I was commissioned by the Gulbenkian Foundation (UK) to write a paper on the growing problem of the loss of burial space in London.
ken worpole the architecture of the cemetery in the west LAST LA NDSCAPES Last Landscapes [...]... that connect these small islands descend and ascend at vertiginously steep gradients, and some of the magic of travelling through the fjords and between the islands of the western archipelago – the gleaming paintwork of the ferries, and their smell of diesel oil, the hot coffee served, the changing skies and roiling of the water, which I remember from visiting and working in Norway in the 1960s – has... high status individuals were cremated along with all their grave goods, rather than buried with them, as they were in Sutton Hoo Their impact on the landscape is more impressive than their contents To the south of the three royal mounds is an Iron Age cemetery containing the remains of several hundred people To the north of the royal mounds is a stone church dating in origin from the middle of the twelfth... Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz chose to evoke these great collective monuments in the landscaping of the Stockholm Woodland Cemetery at the beginning of the twentieth century the cemetery in the city The urban cemetery serves other purposes today It is a reminder not just of another world, but of a different topography, not so much the country in the city or rus in urbe, but a vegetative, entropic, timeless... elemental mystery of death In such places, there is a palpable feeling of both extreme solitude and consolation (Heidegger says of death that it is the shrine of nothingness and at the same time the shelter of being’.3) In such purified settings, one can often feel a melting sense of presence and absence simultaneously, together with the suspension of time The enormity of the world shrinks to a small... during which the narrator tells us that there are today over 180,000 graves in that cemetery, more than the population of the town itself In the closing sequence, the vast cemetery is filmed in long sweeping shots from the air, revealing a city of the dead with its own roads and pathways between the endless rows of graves and monuments Though not on quite the same scale, the cemetery of La Certosa in. .. time in central London towards the end of the nineteenth century, the remains of tens of thousands of people buried in churchyards were excavated and re-interred in mass graves in the newly created suburban cemeteries Such large communal graves can still be seen in the City of London Cemetery, often with a monument erected over them detailing from which churchyard the remains were originally removed The. .. bones by the garden wall at the end of the arcade’.30 There had been a cemetery on the other side of the wall, and ‘just that week they were digging up the skeletons for reburial The soil was still in mounds, the graves open.’ The normality of excavating graves for re-use, and the reburial or storing of the bones elsewhere, was common in many parts of Europe, as it still is today, though the process... in changing modern societies While there is still too little material in many areas, there is one field where there has been considerable work done on the subject, notably in the many books and studies of the impact of mass slaughter in World War One, its effects on the home societies, on the landscapes of battle, and on the arrangements for the disposal of the remains of the many millions killed in. .. people find themselves drawn to these resting places of the dead, feeling perhaps that these are the original and authentic settlements of the world, enduring and timeless, tying us even closer to the landscape and perceived humanity of the world Burial places can provide solace to the living, centuries, even millennia after the horrors of the deaths themselves, and the rites and rituals of various... between the intentions of the designers and the received understandings of the users or spectators is sometimes great In this book I try to appreciate both points of view the cemetery and society Furthermore, no single intellectual discipline or ‘discourse’ structures or shapes this book: it is the product of what the American anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, once called the increasing amount of ‘genre . ken worpole the architecture of the cemetery in the west LAST LA NDSCAPES Last Landscapes