William Hosking - Designs For The Congregationalists' Non-denominational Cemetery

Designs For The Congregationalists' Non-denominational Cemetery

In 1839 William Hosking was chosen by the newly formed Abney Park Cemetery Company to design the buildings and contribute to the layout of a landscaped park cemetery to serve the metropolis of London in which all parts would be open to the burial of anyone regardless of belief or denomination. The aim of the promoters of Abney Park Cemetery was to open the first wholly nondenominational garden cemetery in Europe.

Hosking's brief was to design the cemetery's buildings to reflect this new liberal departure in burial reform, and to complement the cemetery's historic parkland setting into which a magnificent arboretum and educational institute were also to be established.

To complement Hosking's buildings, an appropriate landscape setting was designed and planted by George Loddiges. A landscape vaguely akin to rather simplified version of John Loudon's 'gardenesque' style emerged around the perimeter, with the larger part of the estate remaining naturalistic and partially sylvan, possibly echoing the Rural Cemetery ideal emerging in America insofar as this was practicable in a country where landscape was no longer relatively unaffected by human activity.

The uniquely attractive result was much favoured by John Loudon, both as an exception to his preferred formal style of cemetery design, and to the 'pleasure ground' style he disliked in other contemporary cenmeteries such as at Norwood. Loudon was especially complementary towards Abney Park Cemetery since it offered an educational park, complete with an arboretum that was generally open to free public access, something that he had campaigned for in the vicinity of London.

William Hosking's clients, led by the Abney Park Cemetery's founder and indefatigable Company Secretary George Collison II, worked iteratively with him to prepare a unique design for the Stoke Newington cemetery. Collison increasingly came to the view that Hosking's layout and architectural styles should meet a brief of being symbolic of the cemetery's founding ideals; to reflect the fact that here was to be the first nineteenth century garden cemetery to be neither consecrated, nor set out by Act of Parliament, giving it both a nondenominational character and also permitting inclusion of spaces and designs for wider educational and public access purposes. Hosking's buildings must also respect the landscape, for here, unlike other cemeteries of its period, use of the land for interment was partly viewed as a convenient means to achieve other common purposes; all of the original founders were Congregationalists who shared an underlying motivation to preserve and encourage interest and appreciation in the landscape of Abney Park that 'spoke to them' of the memory of Isaac Watts and Lady Mary Abney. The promoters hoped that the burial fees would provide the revenue to meet this romantic objective.

Although The Rosary cemetery in Norwich had begun to pioneer elements of a nondenominational approach, it had presented only a partial model (it made no progress on designing a nondenominational chapel until the late nineteenth century). Similarly, other cemeteries to date had only been able to apply the term nondenominational in a partial sense, lacking nondenominational entrance lodges or chapels. Consequently, at the date of Hosking's brief, there was no European architectural style for the buildings of a wholly nondenominational cemetery on which he could draw for inspiration. Thus Hosking's brief was both novel and ambitious. There was no similar model to base his designs on, other than what was in a partially state of progress in the 'New World', at Mount Auburn Cemetery near Boston.