Qualla: Nunhead Cemetery

Nunhead Cemetery: Introduction

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Simon Edwards Esq, CC BY-SA 4.0. From the upper slopes of Nunhead Cemetery, framed by overgrown laurel and ivy-strangled tombs, the dome of St Paul's Cathedral floats above the rooftops of southeast London four miles away. It is one of the strangest and most unexpected views in the capital - cathedral and cemetery, the city's grandest sacred space framed by its most forgotten one. Nunhead is the least-celebrated of London's Magnificent Seven Victorian cemeteries. That is what makes it remarkable.

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Image: Simon Edwards Esq | CC BY-SA 4.0

Nunhead Cemetery: A Ring of Cities of the Dead

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Irid Escent, CC BY-SA 2.0. In the 1830s London was burying more people than its parish churchyards could decently accommodate. Bodies were stacked in shallow graves, decomposition fouled water supplies, the smell drifted into neighborhoods that had been respectable. Parliament responded by encouraging priv...

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Image: Irid Escent | CC BY-SA 2.0

Nunhead Cemetery: The First and Last to Be Buried Here

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit C. G. P. Grey, CC BY 2.0. The first grave dug at Nunhead, in October 1840, belonged to Charles Abbott, a 101-year-old grocer from Ipswich. The last burial was of a volunteer soldier who had become a canon of Lahore Cathedral - a small detail that says everything about how Victorian London held the world t...

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Image: C. G. P. Grey | CC BY 2.0

Nunhead Cemetery: Elegant Wilderness

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit GrindtXX, CC BY-SA 4.0. By the middle of the twentieth century the cemetery was full. The United Cemetery Company abandoned it. Without maintenance, lawn became meadow and meadow became woodland. Vandals pulled apart memorials. Tombstones leaned, then fell. Roots cracked open mausoleums. By the 1970s Nu...

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Image: GrindtXX | CC BY-SA 4.0

Nunhead Cemetery: The Scottish Martyrs

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JHvW, CC BY-SA 3.0. Just inside the North Gate, on the right of Dissenters' Road, an obelisk rises from the undergrowth. It is the Scottish Political Martyrs Memorial, the second monument of its kind - the original stands in Edinburgh. It commemorates Thomas Muir, Maurice Margarot, Thomas Fyshe Palm...

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Image: JHvW | CC BY-SA 3.0

Nunhead Cemetery: War Graves Among the Trees

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit GrindtXX, CC BY-SA 4.0. Tucked into the cemetery's quiet plots are 592 First World War Commonwealth service burials and 110 from the Second World War. The First World War graves cluster in three plots - 266 in the United Kingdom plot (Square 89), 23 in the Australian plot, and 36 in the Canadian plot, w...

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Image: GrindtXX | CC BY-SA 4.0