Abney Park Cemetery - First & Second World Wars

First & Second World Wars

Abney Park contains war graves to 371 Commonwealth service personnel who died in the two World Wars and which are registered by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission: 258 from World War I and 113 from World War II. Unusually, Stoke Newington has two 'Cross of Sacrifice' monuments constructed shortly after the end of WWI based on Blomfield's famous design: one on the lawn in front of St. Mary's Church on Church Street, and one in front of the south-facing facade of Abney Park Chapel in the cemetery. The names associated with the first cross are displayed a short distance away (inside the foyer of the public library on Church Street) whilst the names of those associated with the second cross (those who are interred in the cemetery but whose graves could not be given individual headstones) are recorded on a north-facing Screen Wall memorial added to the platform on which it stands. Near the cemetery cross, the names of Second World War servicemen who lost their lives and have been buried in the cemetery without separate commemoration, have also been displayed.

The cemetery's 'Cross of Sacrifice' serves as a landmark, but though rising on a ragstone platform of contrasting Portland Stone, it cannot be viewed on the approach from Church Street since the cemetery company chose to infill Dr Watts' axial walk at the time the war memorial was erected, so they designed the platform screen wall to prevent the cross from being seen from the south. The Trust hopes to change this if a redesign can be agreed, so as to display the cross to be seen from more directions and as a vantage point and focal point overlooking both directions of the original axis from the chapel spire and its ogee arch along Dr Watts' Walk, and on to Abney House gate; the axis that commemorates the life of the Rev. Dr Isaac Watts. Slightly off this exact axial alignment, is the small Blitz memorial that records civilian deaths, closer to the south entrance (picture right).

Though it suffered extensive property damage in the war, Stoke Newington's death toll was relatively low by the standards of some other Hackney districts like Shoreditch, and it would have been lower still, were it not for one incident on 13 October 1940, when a German bomb made a direct hit on a crowded shelter at Coronation Avenue, just off the high street. Most people in the shelter were killed, and as the illustration shows, the list of the dead from this one incident takes up nearly three of the four panels on the memorial. Many of the dead were Jewish and some were refugees from the Nazis.

Of two known unexploded WWII bombs remaining in Stoke Newington, one is located somewhere in Abney Park.