At Bow Cemetery.

I’ve lived in Limehouse for forty years, often heard stories of this extraordinary last resting place of countless Eastenders, but had never visited, until today.

We were both feeling clammy with cabin fever and visiting a cemetery wasn’t the obvious choice, but finding safe solitude in the City on a Sunday is difficult...our longing to feel the sun on our necks prevailed, so off we skulked.

Bow Cemetery was one of seven built to accommodate the inevitable consequences of London’s massive population expansion in the early nineteenth century. Opened in 1841, the site received a quarter of a million EastEnder’s mortal remains in it’s first fifty years, so oversubscribed that public burial plots could be forty feet deep, containing up to thirty bodies. The cemetery was laid out to an unusual, organic plan, with meandering, interconnected pathways between deep, now uncomfortably dense islands of graves.

Rapidly, the cemetery fell out favour, became neglected and finally closed in 1966. Twenty years later, a group of local supporters took over stewardship of the site, which was partially deconsecrated and granted the status of a local nature reserve.
Now, crumbling, tumbling grave decorations lose their individuality, becoming instead a cityscape-in-miniature, rapidly consumed by bewildering displays of biodiversity.

Today, this still sacred space is a joy, dancing with spring sunshine and new growth, once celebrating past lives, now the glory and optimism of renewal.