Free Necropolis: London & it's Dead by Catharine Arnold

first municipal cemetery in Britain, at Southampton, but it was to be his final project. A lifetime of ill-health and overwork had taken its toll. Loudon was in the final stages of lung cancer. Visiting him in Southampton, his wife ‘took one look and knew that he was dying’, and begged him to come home. But Loudon was determined to complete work on the cemetery and correct the proofs for his latest encyclopaedia, a guaranteed money-spinner. Despite Jane’s entreaties, he went on to Bath, where he inspected the site for another cemetery, although he had to be wheeled around in a Bath chair. A visit to another potential client in Oxfordshire had the landowner offering to send Loudon back to London on the train, assisted by one of his servants.
    Once home, Loudon’s doctor informed him bluntly that his condition was terminal. Despite this, Loudon strove to see through all his projects, battling against the disease to complete drawings and finish manuscripts. Heavily in debt and pursued by his creditors, Loudon was anxious to provide for his family. He paced restlessly about the house, defiant to the end. One morning, as she was preparing to leave the house, Jane suddenly caught sight of a changein his expression. Darting forward, she caught her husband before he fell over. Loudon had literally died on his feet.
    It is fitting that Loudon, whose work was such an inspiration to Kensal Green, was buried there. Loudon’s grave in the ‘tasteful, Classical, poetical and elegant’ environs of Kensal Green was marked by a stylish Grecian urn. According to Jane, when the coffin was lowered into the grave, an unfamiliar man stepped forward from the crowd and threw in a few strips of ivy. He was a maker of artificial flowers, grateful that Loudon had sent him free tickets to a garden show, early in his career, when he had been too poor to attend. Never able to thank Loudon in person, this was his way of paying tribute.
    Despite his publishing business and his inventions, Loudon died penniless. Jane struggled to make a living as a journalist and provide for Agnes, later a successful children’s writer. Thirteen years after Loudon went to his grave, Jane joined him.
    On the Laying Out, Planting and Management of Cemeteries and the Improvement of Churchyards, published posthumously in 1844, was to be Loudon’s true memorial.
    By the time of Loudon’s death, London’s graveyards had reached such a repulsive state that there was urgent need for reform. Loudon’s lasting legacy was the contribution he made to the closure of these ‘pestiferous grounds’ and the development of the great London cemeteries.

6: GATHERINGS FROM GRAVEYARDS
    The Dead are Killing the Living
    By 1842, London had become the commercial capital of the world. Following the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, the population expanded from a mere one million to over two and a half million. The historian Thomas Carlyle was horrified by this city of swirling fog and thunderous noise, where coaches, carts, sheep, oxen and far too many people rushed on and on, bellowing and shrieking, as if the world had gone mad. Cobbett had dubbed the city ‘the great Wen’ (an archaic term for a boil or carbuncle); Carlyle went one better. ‘It is a monstrous wen!’ he wrote to his brother. ‘The thick smoke of it beclouds a space of thirty square miles; and a million vehicles grind along its streets forever.’ 1
    As London grew, so did her trail of dead–but the capital’s 200 graveyards did not magically get any bigger. Burial was one aspect of metropolitan life which the planners had not yet confronted, even as they built the new Jerusalem. In shocking reality, London was more necropolis than metropolis, her bustling thoroughfares and sophisticated highways paved with gold for the fortunate few, her side-streets reeking of decay. By 1842, the life expectancy of a professional man was thirty. For a labourer, it was just seventeen. The burgeoning population, drawn to the city