The Victorian Cemetery

Description

Planned with the same passion as a landscape garden, filled with monuments that represented the start of the art of craftsmanship in stone, and equipped with expensively constructed and fashionably designed gatehouses and chapels of rest, the Victorian cemetery was a matter of real civic pride. It was also the ultimate expression of the 'cult of the dead' that gripped every Victorian. This beautifully illustrated study of the Victorian cemetery tells the fascinating story of this historical and architectural phenomenon, which provided towns and cities with some of their most extraordinary, and charming, reminders of the sensibilities of an age long gone.

Sarah Rutherford is a Kew-trained gardener with an MA in the conservation of historic parks and gardens from York University. She worked for English Heritage assessing sites across England for the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens, becoming Head of the Register. During this time she researched and completed her doctoral thesis on the landscapes of nineteenth-century lunatic asylums. She is now an enthusiastic freelance consultant researching and writing conservation plans for parks and gardens. She lives in Buckinghamshire.