Abney Park Cemetery - The Campo Santo of The Dissenters

The Campo Santo of The Dissenters

Such an elaborate planting scheme for a park cemetery may also be a reflection of the symbolic importance the founding directors attached to the land that formed Abney Park Cemetery. As nonconformists, who treasured the independence of their religious beliefs—and therefore practised Christianity outside of the established Church of England—they held the land itself to be of immense significance, for it had previously been two neighbouring and inter-related 18th-century parkland estates, the grounds of Abney House and Fleetwood House, where the non-conformist Doctor of Divinity, educationalist and poet Dr. Isaac Watts lived and taught, and indeed wrote several of his popular books and hymns.

Due to these religious associations, Abney Park Cemetery rapidly became the most attractive Victorian resting place for nonconformist or dissenting ministers and educationalists, principally those from a Protestant dissenting tradition. Indeed it stands today as the most important burial place in the UK of 19th-century Congregational, Baptist, Methodist and Salvation Army ministers and educationalists, including Christopher Newman Hall and many others, some of whom are mentioned below. Whereas Bunhill Fields was described by the poet Robert Southey as "the Campo Santo of the Dissenters" (a reference to the monumental cemetery of that name in Pisa, Italy - campo santo translates as "sacred field" or "saints' abode" ) in respect of its late 17th and 18th centuries burials, Abney Park took on the mantle during the Victorian period in the writings of E. Paxton Hood for the Religious Tract Society.

Though it primarily attracted Congregational, Methodist and Salvation Army nonconformists, rather than certain other nonconformists such as Quakers, or non-Protestant nonconformists such as Catholics or Jewish people, Abney Park Cemetery more than any other 19th century cemetery was open to the burial of all regardless of their religious convictions or leanings. Whilst its founding directors were all Congregationalists and they were concerned to find a place for such burials, they expressly established the Stoke Newington cemetery as the first fully nondenominational cemetery in Europe (where anyone could be buried anywhere). Selection of a site with historical associations with Dr Isaac Watts served this purpose well, for he had been honoured in death with a bust in the Anglican Westminster Abbey to complement his burial at the Independent's Bunhill Fields. Subsequently his hymns and scholarly works had become widely used and referred to by many denominations, such that in the 19th century the Rev. John Stroughton could write: "Dr. Watts was as far removed from sectarianism as a man could be". Abney Park Chapel, sometimes referred to informally as Dr Watts' Chapel, became its spiritual and landscape focal point. It sits in the heart of the cemetery; its axial walk to Church Street, called Dr Watts' Walk, was chosen in 1845 as the most appropriate site in London for a public statue to the great man, sculpted by Edward Hodges Baily, RA FRS.