The cemetery's directors were Dissenters - Protestants who refused to conform to the Church of England. They wanted a burial ground for everyone, regardless of denomination, and they hired architect William Hosking to design its central chapel. Hosking, an engineer and Egyptologist with a scholar's instinct for blending traditions, started from a scaled-down version of an Anglican Gothic minster and then quietly subverted it. He used stock brick instead of stone, giving the building the warm yellow tone of Baltic Brick Gothic rather than the cold stone of an English cathedral. He slipped neo-classical semi-circular arches into the porte cochere where a stricter Gothic Revivalist like Augustus Welby Pugin would have used pointed ones. The result was what the Victorians eventually called Dissenting Gothic, and Abney Park's chapel was the first stand-alone example of Gothic Revival used for an unconsecrated chapel in England.

On the design team alongside Hosking was George Loddiges, the renowned horticulturalist whose nursery had supplied the cemetery with what became the largest arboretum in the country. Loddiges saw the hand of the Creator in plant anatomy, and he and Hosking made the chapel's three rose windows reflect that conviction. Wild roses have five petals and five sepals - or multiples of five. A lime, an orange, or a lemon, all members of the family Rosaceae, will show ten segments inside if you cut it in half. So the chapel got ten-part rose windows, modelled not on the medieval rose of high Gothic but on the botanical rose itself. Hosking borrowed the idea partly from St Procopius Basilica in Trebic, in what is now the Czech Republic, where Jewish and Christian communities had once coexisted - a fitting precedent for a chapel meant to welcome everyone.

Hosking placed the chapel at the heart of Abney Park rather than near the main gate, which was built in a striking Egyptian Revival style. Pine trees were planted along the curving Chapel Ride so that visitors would see the chapel emerge slowly through the trees as they approached. The chapel's most elaborate facade - the crenellated, decorated south elevation, with two octagonal stair turrets framing an ogee arch - did not face the entrance at all. It faced south along a new walkway laid out in memory of Isaac Watts, the great Independent hymn writer who had lived for years at Abney House on Church Street. To walk Dr Watts's Walk towards the chapel was to follow a man's life from his home to his church, even though Watts himself had died nearly a century before.

Where most cemeteries of the period offered two chapels - one Anglican, one Nonconformist - Abney Park offered one. Hosking laid it out as a single internal chamber on a Greek cross plan, with four equal arms, the architectural form most emphatically not associated with Anglican preference. Anyone could be buried from here, regardless of creed. The Cambridge Ecclesiologists, who were busy at the time enforcing High Church orthodoxy in church architecture, were appalled, calling the design pretentious. The more open-minded John Loudon, who had savaged the catacombs at Kensal Green and disliked the pleasure-ground style of Norwood, offered Abney Park nothing but praise. The Lord Mayor of the City of London, Sir Chapman Marshall, laid the foundation stone.

The chapel served its cemetery for over a century before falling into disuse. A fire eventually gutted the interior. The roof, weakened by unauthorised climbing and theft from years when the park was left unsupervised overnight, took on water; the walls suffered. For three decades the chapel stood closed - a building at risk in the centre of an arboretum that had also gone half feral, its Victorian planting scheme collapsing into ivy, brambles, and the densest pocket of urban woodland in inner north London. Then, slowly, the restorations began. The Abney Park Cemetery Trust patched the roof, repaired the structure, and in 2024 the chapel received new stained-glass windows and seating as part of a £5 million restoration programme, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the National Lottery Community Fund, Hackney Council, and the trust itself.

Walk in through the Egyptian gate today and the chapel rises ahead of you through the canopy, still tall, still the most prominent landmark for the streets around. Joggers thread between Victorian tombs. Dog-walkers chat by the half-legible inscriptions of dissenting ministers. Children climb on stone angels. The arboretum that George Loddiges planted - magnolias, redwoods, the strange and the exotic from across the Empire - now grows wild and supports one of the richest urban ecologies in London. From the air, Abney Park reads as an unexpected green diamond between Stoke Newington and Hackney Downs, dense and dark amid the rooftops. Hosking's chapel sits in the middle, its botanical rose windows finally getting their stained glass back, ready to be open again.