The development of the garden cemetery; funerary landscapes and monumentality at Highgate and Père Lachaise c.1804-1914

Wall, Josephine Marie ORCID: 0009-0007-2235-8029 (2023). The development of the garden cemetery; funerary landscapes and monumentality at Highgate and Père Lachaise c.1804-1914. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

Père Lachaise, the first garden cemetery, which opened outside Paris in 1804, was created in response to changing attitudes to death and the overcrowding of Parisian burial grounds. This new form of sacred landscape became incredibly successful and was widely copied by other cemeteries in Europe and North America. Highgate cemetery to the north of London opened in 1839 and was directly compared at the time to Père Lachaise, as were the other early London Cemeteries, now known as the Magnificent Seven. This thesis examines the complex landscape development of these two cemeteries up until the outbreak of The Great War in 1914 and assesses how directly the Père Lachaise model was applied at Highgate. These spaces help us understand the changing ways death was understood and ritualised through funerals in this period, not just as passive mirrors of society but also places where these attitudes and meanings were actively negotiated. These cemeteries were also designed from the beginning to accommodate the expectation of visitors spending their leisure time in cemeteries, which also effected their form and function and allowed cemeteries and the monuments within them further chances to influence social practices more widely.

Garden cemeteries offered new opportunities for monumentalising the dead, making gravestones open to a wider section of the public than ever before. This led to many innovations in style, form and decoration. The elite, who had previously had a virtual monopoly on monuments now looked at innovative ways of designing monuments which would maintain a differentiation between their graves and the others in the cemetery. Although grave monuments are primarily erected as a focus for private grief and to aid with the location of dead loved ones, all monuments also present a carefully curated identity of the deceased to the world. For the ‘notable’ dead - those with a public profile, their monuments must also serve a public function, as sites of memory which help maintain this image in the collective memory. This thesis examines the ways these monuments achieve this and what their wider effect on cemetery development was.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):