“In the middle of the nineteenth century, London had just 218 acres of burial grounds. People were packed into them in densities almost beyond imagining. When the poet William Blake died in 1827, he was buried, at Bunhill Fields, on top of three others; later, four more were placed on top of him. By such means London’s burial places absorbed staggering heaps of dead flesh. St. Marylebone Parish Church packed an estimated one hundred thousand bodies into a burial ground of just over an acre. Where the National Gallery now stands on Trafalgar Square was the modest burial ground of St. Martin-in-the-Fields church. It held seventy thousand bodies in an area about the size of a modern bowling green, and uncounted thousands more were interred in the crypts inside. In 1859, when St. Martin’s announced its intention to clear out the crypts, the naturalist Frank Buckland decided to find the coffin of the great surgeon and anatomist John Hunter so that his remains could be reinterred at Westminster Abbey, and Buckland left a riveting account of what he found inside: “Mr Burstall having unlocked the ponderous oak door of the vault No. 3, we threw the light of our bull’s eye lantern into the vault, and then I beheld a sight I shall never forget.” In the shadowy gloom before him were thousands upon thousands of jumbled and broken coffins, crammed everywhere, as if deposited by a tsunami. It took Buckland sixteen days of dedicated searching to find his quarry. Unfortunately, no one took similar pains with any of the other coffins, which were roughly carted off to unmarked graves in other cemeteries. In consequence the whereabouts of the mortal remains of quite a number of worthies—the furniture maker Thomas Chippendale, the royal mistress Nell Gwyn, the scientist Robert Boyle, the miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard, the highwayman Jack Sheppard, and the original Winston Churchill, father of the first Duke of Marlborough, to name just some—are today quite unknown. Many churches made most of their money from burials, and were loath to give up such lucrative business. At the Enon Baptist Chapel on Clement’s Lane in Holborn (now the site of the campus of the London School of Economics), the church authorities managed to cram a colossal twelve thousand bodies in the cellar in just nineteen years. Not surprisingly, such a volume of rotting flesh created odors that could not well be contained. It was a rare service in which several worshippers didn’t faint. Eventually, most stopped coming altogether, but still the chapel kept accepting bodies for interment. The parson needed the income. Burial grounds grew so full that it was almost impossible to turn a spade of soil without bringing up some decaying limb or other organic relic. Bodies were buried in such shallow and cursory graves that often they were exposed by scavenging animals or rose spontaneously to the surface, the way rocks do in flowerbeds, and had to be redeposited. Mourners in cities almost never attended at graveside to witness a burial itself. The experience was simply too upsetting, and widely held to be dangerous in addition. Anecdotal reports abounded of graveyard visitors struck down The sensible solution to all this horrid foulness, it seemed to many, was to move cemeteries out of the cities altogether and make them more like parks. John Claudius Loudon. In 1843, Loudon wrote and published On the Laying Out, Planting, and Managing of Cemeteries; and on the Improvement of Churchyards—an unexpectedly timely book, as it happened, since he would need a cemetery himself before the year was out. One of the problems with London cemeteries, Loudon pointed out, was that they were mostly built on heavy clay soils, which didn’t drain well and thus promoted festering and stagnation. Suburban cemeteries, he suggested, could be sited on sandy or gravel soils where the bodies planted within them would become, in effect, wholesome compost. Liberal plantings of trees and shrubs would not only create a bucolic air but also soak up any miasmas that leaked out of the graves and replace foul airs with fresh ones. Loudon designed three of these new model cemeteries and made them practically indistinguishable from parks. Bryson, Bill. At Home (p. 389). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Bryson, Bill. At Home (pp. 388-389). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Bryson, Bill. At Home (pp. 387-388). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Bryson, Bill. At Home (p. 387). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Bryson, Bill. At Home (pp. 386-387). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Bryson, Bill. At Home (p. 386). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. ”