The Rev. George Collison had one daughter, Hannah; and a son, George Collison II. George II took up his father's previous occupation - law - and became Secretary and Registrar of the Abney Park Cemetery Company when it was founded in the late 1830s; he is considered to be the cemetery's founder. It was his initial research, including a visit to Massachusetts to observe the New World's non-denominational approach to cemetery design at Mount Auburn, and a study of London burial statistics designed to show a sufficiency of income from burials to maintain Abney Park as a historic parkland, that enabled his project to succeed. His close links to wealthy City Congregationalists, and to Congregational Ministers, also enabled him to form an unusually like-minded group of backers to launch and finance the venture.
All of the founders of the Abney Park Cemetery joint stock company were, like Collison, Congregationalists. The Congregationalists of London were already familiar with leading an avowedly non-denominational enterprise promoted largely by Congregationalists; their parallel in this regard being the London Missionary Society. George Collison II acted on behalf of the Abney Park Cemetery Joint Stock Company, to press home their 'New World' idea for a novel garden cemetery with a unique non-denominational design philosophy similar to the Congregationalists' approach to missionary work. George worked as the client representative to guide the company's architect William Hosking and its botanist and nurseryman George Loddiges, to bring about his desired effect.
Underpinning his philosophical and urban design ideas, was George Collison's studies of the cemeteries of Europe and, more importantly of North America. His ideas were new to European cemetery design; influenced partly by Mount Auburn Cemetery near Boston in Massachusetts which he visited in the 1830s. In the 1860s the cemetery's chaplain Thomas Barker was to write of the cemetery as 'sweet Abney' echoing the well-known poem 'Sweet Auburn' and adding that 'it is a spot of rare, if not unsurpassed lovliness; as a resting-place for the good it is indeed the most picturesque'. More directly, in 1840, George Collison himself wrote that: 'Mount Auburn, near Boston... may be considered a kind of prototype of the rest, is an object of transcendent interest to the traveller, and, is in a great degree similar to our own cemetery at Abney Park'. This remark about the weight Collison accorded to Mount Auburn Cemetery, together with Collison's wider cemetery studies, were collated and published in his methodical review and reflection entitled:
- Cemetery Interment...Descriptions of Pere la Chaise, the Eastern Cemeteries, And those of America.. and more particularly of the Abney Park Cemetery Company 1840.
This learned volume set out a meticulous listing of all the trees and shrubs commissioned for the Abney Park A to Z Arboretum, and for ornamental beds around the chapel, and for its rosarium of over one thousand cultivars, varieties and species; together with a potential design for a monument to commemorate the life of Dr Isaac Watts whose association with the Abney estate had been a principal motivation for Collison's commercial cemetery scheme, which appears to an extent to have become a vehicle to finance the preservation of, and public access to, the revered Abney Park.
George Collison II was a keen promoter of there being a commemorative statue to Isaac Watts in London, and helped establish a committee to take the idea forwards. An early design was illustrated as the frontispiece to above book; and an eventual design by Edward Hodges Baily was adopted in 1844/5 with the support of city and religious philanthropists, but by this date George Collison had left the cemetery company in which he had formerly been so closely involved; he disappears from the historical record and may have left England for America.
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