Abney Park Chapel, is a Grade II Listed chapel, designed by William Hosking and built by John Jay that is situated in Europe's first wholly nondenominational cemetery, Abney Park Cemetery, London.
Opened in May, 1840, it was the first nondenominational cemetery chapel in Europe (and probably the world - since the chapel at Mount Auburn was a later addition). It helped pioneer the early use of the Dissenting Gothic building style, and encouraged renewed interest in the careful blending of earlier styles.
It was primarily the work of a small design team consisting of George Collison II (acting as client for the cemetery founders, with a passion for Mount Auburn Cemetery near Boston, and it is said, Beverley Minster which dominated the skyline in his ancestral town); William Hosking (architect and civil engineer with an interest in Egyptology, antiquities, and architectural writing and scholarship); the builder John Jay, and George Loddiges (botanical scientist and horticulturalist primarily concerned with the setting of Abney Park Chapel, including its nearby rosarium and a collection of American plants on the Chapel Lawn).
Read more about Abney Park Chapel: Location and Orientation, The Blending of Styles, The Single Cell Layout, The Axial Vista in Memory of Isaac Watts, Support and Controversy For The New Approach, The Landscape Setting, The Chapel Today
Famous quotes containing the words park and/or chapel:
“Is a park any better than a coal mine? What’s a mountain got that a slag pile hasn’t? What would you rather have in your garden—an almond tree or an oil well?”
—Jean Giraudoux (1882–1944)
“I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.
And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And ‘Thou shalt not’ writ over the door;”
—William Blake (1757–1827)