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Cemeteries are Museums of People! History beneath our feet. Blogs, tours & talks curated by London Heritage Guide & historian Sheldon K. Goodman Graveyards.

Cemeteries. Spooky, No? Well, No, they’re not. Burial Grounds are like libraries – admittedly, Libraries of the dead – beautiful spaces which are now cradles for nature, heritage and remarkable stories that time has faded from common knowledge. Thousands, no – millions of people have ended their stories in these remarkable grounds and this blog seeks to highlight them and the places where their mo

rtal remains shall lie forever. In May 2013, Cemetery Club was founded: an appreciation society that celebrates these often overlooked and misunderstood places. Stories can be found here: stories of heroes and villains, inventors and actors, people who once lived, laughed, loved and cried.

10/08/2026

Today marks six months since Mum died.

One of the things I’ve struggled in the aftermath of it all is the relentless onward march of the world around me, while I’ve come to sort-of complete stop. Grief is a tricky beast. Some days I’m alright, other days just doing the basics like washing and eating are horrendously hard to do. I’ve yet to be able to look more than a day at a time in my calendar.

Beckenham Cemetery has become my focus as I’ve tried to perform something of a restoration on Evermore Walk, where she’s buried, besides enthusiastically throwing myself into fish keeping.

I planted some lupins the other day on her grave, she loved lupins. I’ve also specifically chosen drought tolerant plants such as achillea and salvia caradonna to replicate the vibrant mound of flowers that covered her grave after she was initially lowered in. The brush up of her neighbours graves continues as well. No mean feat in these temperatures: but she’d have loved it.

I often think of Theodore Roosevelt, who marked a large black X in his diary after his wife and mother died on the same day, writing simply: “The light has gone out of my life.” Mine hasn’t come back on yet.

I’m incredibly fortunate in that I have the most patient and loving partner, wonderful friends and family who have carried me on the days I couldn’t manage it myself.
Gardening has become one of the greatest comforts. Watching bees, ladybirds and butterflies visiting the flowers on Mum’s grave has reminded me that cemeteries aren’t just places of death; they’re places where life quietly continues. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons I’ve always loved them.

🎵: Sailing to Philadelphia by Mark Knopfler. Mum used to do a cracking bit of choreography to the chorus, it’s one of the songs both she, me and dad liked to listen to together.

31/07/2026

Usually when there’s an open day, if the cemetery has a catacomb, they’ll open them up. Provided they haven’t been trashed by black magic practitioners in the 1960s, what we see today is not what our 19th century forebears would have necessarily seen. We see decaying bits of wood on shelves: when new in the 1830s -1880s(ish), you would have seen vibrant, stylish and expensive bits of funerary furniture that were meant to look good on a shelf.

Take this image of the West Norwood catacombs. A number of coffins in the present day rest on tiers on iron bars in a vault. The paint is flaking off. Some of the softer woods are perishing. The velvet on some of the coffins has tarnished.

Picture 2 gives an imperfect view, had I been in the same spot in the 1880s. I say imperfect, as AI has made some velvet-covered coffins wood and vice versa, but it gives you a good idea of how attractive these vaults would have been to prospective buyers who wished their dead to have the premium storage option.

Picture 3 goes one step further: it’s how you may have seen the vault were you there in the mid 19th century. The scalloped wall-mounted candle holders were a definite feature in Brompton’s catacombs, I have no idea if West Norwood ever had them, but it gives you a general idea.

29/07/2026

High. Cooke. Earle. Familial names that repeat several times over. An oddly sparse churchyard that clearly contains more dead than the gravestones above ground are letting on.

In 29-degree heat, myself and paid a visit to St Nicholas’ Church in Salthouse: the parish church of what was once one of North Norfolk’s busiest ports. Centuries of silting and shifting coastlines have transformed this thriving medieval harbour into the peaceful village it is today, but the church remains as a reminder of that lost prosperity.

In the churchyard, the repetition of surnames tells its own story of generations who lived, worked and died here. It feels remarkably open, yet that only serves as a reminder that most memorials have long since disappeared. Beneath the grass lie the lives of countless fishermen, merchants, mariners and families who helped shape this extraordinary corner of the Norfolk coast, including the unnamed mariner who lost his life during the Second World War.

The church was sadly closed, but its doorway was scrawled with historic graffiti from the 17th and 18th century: perhaps those who scrawled their initials into the stone are now themselves buried in the churchyard.

Some places whisper their history. Salthouse barely needs to raise its voice.

26/07/2026

One of the things I like to do is read this weeks copy of the Illustrated London News, but from a century ago. It’s a marvellous use of my The British Newspaper Archive subscription.

It is incredible how little of the ILN actually pertains to anything related to London: this week’s copy from July 1926 has a tiger basking in the shade of the jungle on the cover, and a rather pompous opinion piece by G.K. Chesterton that I couldn’t bring myself to finish reading.

But it’s this image inside that’s proved to be the conundrum for me this week: behold ‘A Tomb for a Hunter’ by modernist sculptor Alfred Horace Gerrard. Its prominence comes from the fact it was displayed in the gardens of what is now Tate Britain, and shows various African animals sculpted in a single block of stone.

Putting aside the hunter element which is contentious enough as it is, can I find what happened to this sculpture once it was reported in the Times? Nope. It simply vanishes. It is stated its display at the Tate is ‘ahead of its installation in a country churchyard’ which is then repeated several times over in other publications. But which one? There’s not a whisper of it on FindAGrave. Or anywhere! The size of it! It must be somewhere!

Who commissioned this piece? Maybe one of you Cemetery Clubbers can help me.

24/07/2026

Walking back from Fish Planet London to the bus stop, I stumped across Fairchild Gardens in Shoreditch - a little park that immediately had my cemetery-sense quiver: ‘there be bones here’ I thought - these little burial grounds are very distinctive, no matter how much modern landscaping they’ve had since their original function ceased.

It was the burying place of St.Leonard’s Shoreditch and was probably on the watch-list for London’s Resurrection Men - grisly fiends who sought to plunder the recently deceased in the 19th century to provide training corpses for budding anatomists on the city.

In its 21st century guise however, it’s known as Fairchild Gardens, named after its most prestigious burial. Thomas Fairchild (picture 3) was a nurseryman and 18th century gardener extraordinaire, who bred and sold plants in Hoxton, often selling exotic species friends had given him from their travels.

But this supply of exotics was unreliable, so he took matters into his own hands. He developed the first hybrid plant - by pollinating the female part of a carnation flower using pollen from a male Sweet William in 1716. The pressing of this landmark flower is the 5th picture. This caused him no end of worry: in a world where things in nature were the creation of God, not man. Out of fear, it led him to fund an annual sermon at St Leonards praising creation. Think Frankenstein’s monster, but floral.

He was buried here in 1729 and Ares Landscape Architects spruced up the burial ground to honour his 350th birthday.

12/07/2026

A gorgeous window I saw in the background of this week’s Songs of Praise. The Church of Holy Rude on Stirling has a close association with the Regimental Association of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, whose headquarters are at Stirling Castle.

Commissioned to remember over 6000 members of the Regiment who died during . The window features a Highland soldier surrounded by the Commonwealth War Graves headstones of his fallen comrades.

📷: Brian McLaren.

11/07/2026

Don’t mind me, just coming through with a mouthful of raw sausages.

08/07/2026

An update, as I figure things out.

2026 is proving to be a real bastard of a year. Bad enough I lose my mum, but I’m staying down the barrel of unemployment essentially come August. Never rains but it pours.

Mums grave is proving to be one of my little sanctuaries: to be honest I’m not visiting many cemeteries at the moment as I’m focussing on the grave I myself one day will be put into. Operation ‘Tart-Up-Evermore-Path’ continues apace, bringing bees and flowers to a part of the cemetery that probably has been tended to since the 1960s.

Topped up the soil on mums grave with some moisture control soil, ahead of some sort of planting while the soil settles: deliberate use of salvias, dianthus, thyme, lavenders and helichrysum to add colour and pollinators to the site.

Mums neighbours get a brush up too: gazania, geraniums, lady’s mantle and snapdragons planted in abundance. Pictures three and four show Cissie, who died in Walton-on-Thames, whose stone was so filthy you couldn’t see the lettering. So me and dad did our research and gave it a refresh. It’s like new now.

I’m a pending stupid amounts of money on this but it’s for my old mum, and for those around her who haven’t had anyone to tend their graves in decades.

Halloween around Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park is being sorted, by the way. I wonder if the cemetery would be up for letting me do a tour here.

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