Flickering Lamps
History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past…
Tag: egyptian revival
The Steel City’s garden of rest: Sheffield General Cemetery
Sheffield, in south Yorkshire, is famous around the world as a centre of steel production – stainless steel was invented in the city in 1912 and many thousands of the city’s residents worked in crucibles and factories producing steel and steel products such as…
Taking a look inside the mausoleum of an eccentric earl and his tragic mistress
Most of the grand mausolea we see in Victorian cemeteries are private spaces, accessible only to the families of those interred within or blocked off and sealed forever to keep vandals out. However, today we are visiting a mausoleum with an unusual story attached…
Soldiers, adventurers and rumours of a time machine: tales from Brompton Cemetery
A few weeks ago, I went to Brompton Cemetery again. I was with my friend Sharon, a fellow graveyard explorer, and I also had a new camera lens to put through its paces. Since my last visit, a lot of the undergrowth that had…
Cimetière de Montmartre: an abandoned quarry transformed into a stunning necropolis
Cimetière de Montmartre, in Paris’ 18th arrondissement, did not have the most glamorous or auspicious of beginnings. It was originally a gypsum quarry, situated outside of the city walls, and after the quarry was abandoned, a section of it was used as a mass…
The Victorian splendour of Highgate’s Western Cemetery
Highgate is London’s famous cemetery – it’s the one that most people think of first when Victorian cemeteries are mentioned and it’s the most well known of the “Magnificent Seven” cemeteries that date from the early Victorian period. Its location on a hillside overlooking…
A taste for the dramatic: the grand monuments of Kensal Green
One of the things that has always appealed to me about the big Victorian cemeteries is their sense of drama, and their grand, elaborate memorials. Of course, there’s nothing new about the moneyed commissioning ostentatious memorials for themselves and their loved ones, but in…
