The Brompton Cemetery, Part 1 (picture heavy)

I love cemeteries. Not a "Perpetual Care Memorial Gardens" with uniform bronze plaques in the ground with plastic sun-resistant bouquets on them, but a bona fide old cemetery where cracked and leaning headstones, with long, drawn out descriptions of birth, family, occupations, death, etc are scattered.  I especially love it when, in the same graveyard, you can find a grave of a woman born in 1715, the grave of a soldier killed in 1917, and the grave of someone's grandmother who died in 1999. I don't mean to be flippant about death and grief, but I find these places to be beautiful and (pardon the pun) haunting.

 A cemetery is macabre playground for the imagination.  For those of us with a flair for the dramatic (or should I say melodramatic), there is basically no better place to find a good story.  When I was 16, while on a six weeks tour of Canada in a camper with my family, I wrote a long, tragic family saga set in Trois Pistoles, Quebec after wandering through a churchyard cemetery in Trois Pistoles, Quebec (imagine that) and noticing how many babies and children were buried there.  I took particular inspiration from a little stone from 1850-something for an 18 month old little girl named Bethlehem, and the inscription "Budded on earth to bloom in heaven." It's funny how sorrow can transcend time so vividly in a graveyard.

There are a million little church graveyards in London, where you can find all of the above, and in many cases, all the cool people were buried in the church, literally under the floorboards.  But I'd classify most of them as historical spots, because they've been "at capacity" for the last fifty years or more.  But London also has what is called "The Magnificent Seven:" seven large public (i.e. not affiliated with a specific church) cemeteries built in the early 19th century to accommodate the dearly departed of the rapidly increasing population of London during the Industrial Revolution.  Most of them are still in use (for a very large sum of money) today.

So yesterday, I went to the Brompton Cemetery, located out on the Fulham Road near the Chelsea Football Club.  It was built in 1839 by the architect Benjamin Baud, and is about 39 acres, and has everything from creepy family mausoleums to huge statues and war memorials to mass pauper graves to simple wooden crosses.

According to The Wikipedia,"The cemetery is today a cruising ground popular with West London's gay men scene," (a fine specimen of wikipedia scholarship), though I think "The cemetery is today ground popular with recreational walkers and their small unleashed dogs" would be more accurate. That being said, I wouldn't want to hang out there at nightfall for reasons other than gay cruisers: 1) ghosts 2) it is the place where the villain in the first Robert Downy Jr. Sherlock Holmes movie breaks out of his tomb and 3) drug users.


It was actually very quiet for a Sunday afternoon. So quiet that a fox came out to play, which basically made my entire month!

It is really rare to see a fox in London (or anywhere or that matter).  I thought he was a big orange tabby at first, but then I tiptoed around and we just stared at each other for a long two minutes. There was a woman walking down the lane and I crooked my finger at her like a crazy person.  "There's a fox!" I whispered, like a crazy person.  It took her a good while to realize that I was not a (that) crazy person.  And we both took pictures of this little guy.

No shortage of pretty stone crosses, but this was the prettiest.

A heartbreaking toddler grave.

A kit of pigeons.

One of many beheaded statue people

A whole Mess-O-Graves.

The whole place was covered in weeds but smelled delightfully of sweet peas, most of which have recently sprouted their pods.

This grave has a really interesting story.  Read the whole thing here: http://articles.latimes.com/1997-05-28/news/mn-63097_1_sioux-chief.  Basically, a Sioux Chief (probably not an actual chief, but hard to find out now), Schoongamoneta Hoska AKA Long Wolf, after having been wounded in the glorious Battle of Little Bighorn, was recruited by Col. William Cody (Buffalo Bill) to perform in his Wild West Show.  He died of pneumonia in 1892 while touring with the show at Earl's Court and was buried in Brompton Cemetery, along with an 18-month old Sioux baby (child of a cast member) named Star that fell off a horse in a show.  Then a hundred years later, an English housewife came across a mention of the grave in a book and started investigating it, and he was eventually exhumed and taken back to tribal land in South Dakota in 1997.  And then they planted this lovely lavender bush.  I wonder if they exhumed the baby as well, but I can't find any mention of her.   

Butterfly and Bee love

This is where Lord Blackwood busted up out of his grave!

Watcher

"Oh, snap! Where'd my hand go?"

I'm forever fascinated by "died on accident" war memorials.  If you're spending all that money or a giant headstone, I'd put something a bit more glamorous on the inscription.  

A beautiful grave in the more recent sections.  

The cemetery holds almost 300 Commonwealth soldiers from WWI maintained by the government (which is why they look so much tidier).  

Who needs a headstone when you can have a garden instead.

A very recent (and very precarious) grave dug into the bank.  The dirt had all sorts of scraps of metal in it.  

Another garden grave.

And what graveyard is complete without the requisite creepy ravens perched on a wooden cross.
Quoth the Raven: Nevermore!

There will possibly be a Part II since I took so many pictures that my camera died half way through.