A Deluge of Dead Guys; or, What Do You Do With A Disused Churchyard? Part One: St. Paul's

If you're unfamiliar with St. Paul's Cathedral, watch this video and edumacate yourself.

This is literally the only thing you need to know about St. Paul's.

Ok, maybe not really. Here's a little more. St. Paul's is to the Anglicans what St. Peter's is to the Catholics. It sits on top of Ludgate Hill, the highest point in London, and for a long time was the tallest building in London. It has what is called a protected view- that is, new buildings can't go up if they will block somebody's line-of-sight to St. Paul's. The current building is the fifth cathedral to sit on the site and was designed by Christopher Wren. There has been a church on the site since at least 604 AD; this one has been there since the seventeenth century. The cathedral has an extensive crypt, where all manner of famous and important people are interred. (But, seeing as how I'm interested in marginalization, I honestly couldn't give a bent pin about them. Vivent les paysans!) It also has a very nice green surrounding it.

Roses, which will bloom soon.

A wonderful statue of Thomas Beckett. Becket? I am not too sure on the spelling of that.

Here we see the church partaking in one of those 'modern' burials where you just have a cloth on your face and your body is left for the birds to eat. Or maybe this fella's just napping.

However, its churchyard wasn't organized as the lovely garden it is now and landscaped until 1878.

What do you think it was before then?

Did you say graveyard?

(Please, please, please tell me that you said graveyard. If you've been following this blog at ALL, you said graveyard. If you haven't, well, then I forgive you. But, uh, given the title of the blog... you shoulda guessed graveyard anyways.)
 
It was a graveyard. And, as is the case in many of the city squares and greens that were once places of final rest, this one has several monuments still standing. However, most are very poorly conserved and are either partially or entirely illegible. In some cases, the writing is completely gone, and sometimes this is intentional. This is because many of the parks use the monuments as art pieces- they lend atmosphere and help keep the mood serious. It's hard to play handball when there's a mini-mausoleum in the way.

"But hold on a tick!" you might be saying. "Back up a bit. Mind explaining gravestone conservation to the rest of us normal people- the ones who DON'T spend their spare time hanging out in graveyards?"

Certainly! Many gravestones in active cemeteries are regularly grit-cleaned so that the information is readable. They are considered historically important because of the information on them, whereas in the churchyard parks, they are often not maintained because the aged look of the stone is what they're going for. It's entirely aesthetic. They can do this because the old churches kept immaculate, if illegible records of who was buried where. 

So, what's the condition of what was once the Anglican church's most important graveyard?

Let's take a look then, right.

I thought these were flat stones, left in place.

Whoops, turns out they're dry riser grates.

Cute little mini-maus...

That seems to be used for some kind of storage.

Nearly all of the stones are in terrible condition, writing-wise. Unless I zoom in, there's no words discernible to the naked eye, the camera lens, or the rubbings. Yes. I made rubbings.

A flat stone that might be a gravestone. Argument for: it's awkwardly flat and in the middle of a flower bed. Argument against: it's very uncharacteristically shaped and it's made using what looks to be blue shale, which isn't a period-accurate common material for gravestones, which were typically marble, granite, or slate.

What is even the point of this gate.

This is an example of a paired memorial, where the husband and wife share it. Memorials like these were exempt from the 1842 cemetery laws; as such, you often see later dates on them.

An example of the condition many of these monuments are in. Granite gavestones in the cemeteries that are nearly contemporary with this one are often still readable.

Seriously, this was carved only a year before the cemetery laws took effect.

There are no vertical headstones or flat ground slabs remaining in St. Paul's; along that line, there are no individual graves. All of the following monuments had at least two messes of engraving that were once hypothetically names/dates.

Here's an example of what I meant earlier. This guy, William Meller, Esq., was interred in 1850 because his family, who is listed on the stone's other three sides, were all interred earlier.

A zoom-out on Mr. Meller's side.

If you move widdershins, this was the side you saw.

The obverse of the Meller monument.

Many of the memorials were incorporated into the flower beds.

This one had a lot of names on it, all part of the Simmon family.

It seems that many of these remain because they couldn't be removed otherwise. Standing headstones are a lot easier to remove and a lot easier to put in a crypt storage room or hang on the wall. However, by using these pieces as part of the landscape, they do find a use for them, barring their original intent. People sit on these. They picnic on them. It's all very reminiscent of that scene in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil when the narrator and his guide around Savannah have a bourbon picnic on top of a gravestone shaped like a bench. It's a really nice old-world sort of attitude that keeps even these disused churchyards as active spaces that people engage with on a regular basis.

Even if it's just for a power-nap.