ARCHITECTURE

The Abney Park Chapel & 'Egyptian Revival' Entrance Buildings

Introduction: Design Context

The two most important buildings in the park are the Abney Park Chapel and the 'Egyptian Revival' entrance buildings. To understand something of their architecture and design principles, an appreciation of the novel purposes of the Abney Park Cemetery founders is an essential beginning.

Abney Park was the first European garden cemetery (i.e. burial ground complete with reception buildings, chapel and landscaping), to take a wholly non-denominational and ecumenical approach; here there were to be no invidious dividing lines separating any parts of the park for exclusive use by a particular religious group - no consecration of a part of the cemetery except where individuals chose this for their plot, and no Act of Parliament to establish the land as a cemetery rather than, indeed, a park.

This non-denominational freedom built on the Congregationalist founders' non-denominational principles that underpinned their approach to The London Missionary Society, the slavery abolitionist cause and emerging New World cemetery design.

Moreover, the company's prospectus made great play of the fact that it would be a cemetery 'which shall be open to all classes of the community'. Abney Park was therefore open to the burial of the labouring classes in common graves; a situation made more necessary after London's city burial grounds were closed in 1852, but which was not offered by the other garden cemeteries of the period on account of the loss of revenue compared to sales to the well to do. nonetheless, in breaking the mould, Abney Park Cemetery did not offer its most saleable plots to those seeking common grave burial; the company allocated the shady spaces between the boundary walls and the  peimeter arboretum, some distance from the most expensive (pathside) locations. Today these might well be sought-after as woodland burial locations, and possibly in that sense too, Abney Park was a pioneer.

The design team consisted of the client, George Collison; the architect William Hosking FSA; the landscape advisor George Loddiges; and Egyptologist Joseph Bonomi junior.

The Abney Park Chapel

[architect: William Hosking FSA]

Abney Park Chapel, is therefore a pioneering design, influenced by the early 'Gothic Revival' style but standing apart in many distinct ways so as to represent its being the first non-denominational cemetery chapel in Europe (and possibly the earliest example in the world, since the chapel at Mount Auburn Cemetery, the design inspiration for Abney Park Cemetery, was not added until some years later).

Today the Abney Park Chapel is a sad shell, home to a goodly population of pigeons and used from time to time as a setting for creepy films. The interior panelling, seating and evening the floor has been removed.

Splendid botanical rose windows (i.e. ten segments consistent with the five and ten part flowers and fruit of the Rosaceaea family) are the only ones in the UK outside of Yorkshire, and rarely matched abroad except at a World Heritage Site in Eastern Europe, but are open to the winds. Such rose window designs faithfully refer to the five or ten parts of the roseaceae family flowers and fruit (five petals and five sepals per flower) rather than more widespread gothic units of design based on multiples of three ('trefoil') or four ('quatrefoil'), or an often more conceptual basis, for rose window design.

The remains of fine carving can be seen on the dramatic turreted south facade that was designed to face Dr Watts' 'observatory' on the rooftop of Abney House to give an alignment in his memory towards both Abney House and its carrigeway gates and the route he trod from the house to the lower part of the estate to help compose his hymns, educational verses and books.

Abney Park Chapel's imposing steeple, a 'sister' to the dramatic octagonal spire at Bloxham Church in Oxfordshire which is currently being restored, is fortunately still in good structural condition.

A number of old drawings and photgraphs of the chapel can be found; some showing it romantically cloaked in ivy, and the Abney Park Chapel remains today an inspiration to local artists.

The Chapel is in urgent need of repair to the roof to keep out rain and to prevent further deterioration, though the provision of impressive wrought iron gates and screens has been generally successful in preserving it. Indeed both Abney Park's chapel and also the extent of standing monuments, provides a much better preserved example of a Victorian garden cemetery than many other garden cemeteries of its period e.g. the cemeteries at Nunhead and Norwood which have lost either areas of Victorian monuments, entrance lodges, or chapels.

The Trust would particularly like to see the chapel's stained glass windows restored. These were donated by a benefactor (Dr Nathaniel Rogers) whose listed mausoleum can be seen close to Church Street and is designed, to allow a tiny view through to the chapel along the principal axial vista on whose alignment it sits. The Trust would also like to restore the main axial vista and walk along Dr Watts's Walk, improving it where practicable on the alignment from the Abney House gates at Church Street, to the Chapel steeple.

For the future, the Trust is seeking funding to make a full restoration of the fabric and to reburbish the interior to make it suitable for some modern usage. There is no longer a need for a funerary chapel, and many ideas, ranging from a crematorium to a concert hall, have been suggested as suitable ways to bring a well-loved building back to active life.

The 'Egyptian Revival' Entrance Buildings

[architect: William Hosking FSA]

The architect of the unique non-denominational chapel was William Hosking, who also designed the splendid pair of 'Egyptian Revival' Temple Lodges, pylons and entrance gates. These were kept to a tight client brief so as to symbolise a non-denominational approach, which in their case was achieved by Hosking looking beyond the architecture of the Christian and Western world to the Egyptian cradle of civilisation in the African continent.

Thus Abney Park has the honour of being the first example of the design and use of an 'Egyptian Revival' entrance for a complete ensemble or frontage of gates and lodges of any cemetery in the western world.

Earlier forays into the use of 'Egyptian Revival' architecture for cemeteries in the western world had been made but were of a very cautious, small-scale or temporary nature. The gateway at Mount Auburn Cemetery from which Abney Park took its inspiration, was not redesigned and built as a permanent stone structure until two years after Abney Park's design and construction had been completed. And Mount Auburn's design, though an inspiration to Abney Park, had employed the 'Egyptian Revival' style only for  the gateway itself, as in a more simplified and less prominent way for Sheffield's (initially) nonconformist cemetery where the Egyptian Revival had also inspired only a small gateway structure, built in 1836. 

One of the important architectural features of the 'Egyptian Revival' entrance ensemble of Temple Lodges, pylons and gates, is its use of motifs advised by the famous Egyptologist Joseph Bonomi junior. At the top of the entrance pillars are fine carvings of groups of three flower heads and the ribbed flower sepals of the Sacred Lotus (Nelumbium nucifera; syn. Nymphaeae nelumbo or Nymphaeae Lotus), which once grew along the banks of the Nile but is today rare or extinct in the wild in Africa, having long been collected for introduction to much of Asia where it also acquired the status of a religious and spiritual symbol and is called the Bean of India.

The Victorian & Edwardian Frontage Additions

The 'Egyptian Revival Temple Lodges' were gradually added to throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as demand for space grew. The range of buildings developed alongside the North Temple Lodge were of a mixed design since these could not be seen from the main vista or approach to the frontage ensemble, once the Victorian building line had been developed to preclude the original symmetry from being appreciated. Somewhat hiden from the approach view, this side of the entrance builkdings became used for grounds services and included a traditional square brick-built building with a pitched slate roof and a range of greenhouses.

A quite different approach was taken to extension of the South Temple Lodge. As teh Victorian building line developed, the approach to these became the main vista from the High Street, which was itself important as a stretegic route into the capital. The additional buildings therefore respected the form and massing of the original Temple Lodge almost exactly. The last addition to be built in this style was the cemetery shop, constructed on the freehold forecourt with a small flower-bed alongside, in the 1930s and let to the local stone mason as no 219 Stoke Newington High Street. It is a building of some architectural interest, especially its notable up-to-the minute and unusual use of a metal window design, and the discrete mason shop lettering on its wall in sepulchural style. Though interesting in such detail, the basic construction of this final addition was kept very simple in terms of materials so as not to be a pastiche of, or detract from, Hosking's 'Egyptian Revival' Southern Temple Lodge

Abney Park's Important Collection of Monuments

The variety of memorial styles is matched by the variety of materials, and geologists have found Abney Park a valuable source of interest-in identifying the many types of natural rocks from limestones through sandstones to marbles, slates and granites-and information-a living text book on the effect of acid rain, which varies from catastrophic to negligible.

Social science students can see the tragic impact of perinatal and childhood deaths on the one hand, and the smug self-satisfaction of the grander types on the other, equally displayed in the inscriptions.

Public Monuments & Statues

From the Abney Park Chapel you can follow a fascinating 'walk' to the Church Street entrance past some of the most interesting memorials, chosen for their visual impact and for the importance of the individuals commemorated.

What was once the grand axial walk in Dr Watts' memory, aligned directly between the Chapel steeple, its ogee arch, the catacombs, the former Abney House, and its gates, can be negotiated with due care in-between the infill graves. The route passes two major 'public' memorials; in sequence:

a) Commonwealth War Memorial:

b) Statue of Dr Isaac Watts:

Nearby is the cemetery's most famous landmark, the statue to Dr Isaac Watts - a well-known writer of hymns, verses, and educational books published largely in London and Boston, who became an ecumenical national figure appreciated by Anglicans as equally as Dissenters whilst he lived as a guest in Abney House. He moved here with Lady Mary Abney following an earlier period of residence in Hertfordshire and earlier still at Fleetwood House.

His monument was designed in the mid ninetheenth century by E.W.Baily RA; one of the most important sculptors of his generation. The iron railings around the base of the statue were refurbished in the early 1990s by the Trust. Though not stricytly correct in all its details, the inscription gives an outline of Watts' life, for whom Abney Park was a major creative inspiration.

Isaac Watts is buried in Bunhill Fields, in Abney Park's 'predessor burial ground' (as far as the burial of nonconformists rather than other groups, is concerned).

In addition to this statue, Abney Park also includes 'Dr Watts' Mound': a small granite memorial to his favourire island herony in the Hackney Brook at the lower end of the estate.

c) Civilian War Memorial:

Abney Park's Picturesque Approach to the Monuments of Individuals

Architectural historians have sometimes under-rated Abney Park Cemetery's monuments because it 'off the beaten track' in East London and conventionally, the mark of a 'good Victorian cemetery', has been the size and cost - or degree of aggrandisement - of its monuments. One will find a different design imperative here. Elsewhere, the ultimate celebration of the Victorian moneyed individual took the form of the mausoleum: a form of funerary architecture that was traditional at other London cemeteries of the period, such as at Brompton, Kensal Green and Highgate. It was avoided at Abney Park: indeed, Abney Park has just one mausoleum and even this carefully doubles-up with a wider landscape purpose, forming a double-windowed or 'see-through' piece of architecture directly aligned on the main axial vista in menmory of Isaac Watts and Lady Mary Abney to whom the cemetery is dedicated.

Abney Park's distinctly more picturesque approach is a reflection of the importance its founders attached to ideas that differed from the mainstay of Victorian expectation and convention. The strength of Abney Park's landscape and sephulchural design lies in the importance it places on nature, botany and landscape - including educational use of the landscape - and the preservation of Abney Park as a special historic and religious 'place', rather than the common practice elsewhere of allowing individual aggrandisement to overwhelm this. Moreover, a picturesque rather than a dramatic approach to monuments was also firmly in the self-effacing Puritan tradition - and large personality-gratifying edifices were frowned upon in such quarters. Isabella Holmes' writings became a byword for this more considered approach to design:

"There are many sad sights but there are few as sad as one of these huge graveyards.... can there be any more profitless mode of throwing away money... the only people who profit by them are a few marble and granite merchants, and a few monumental masons - and they might be better employed"!

Even Abney Park Cemetery may not have escaped her glare, for though noted for its relatively 'quiet demeanour' and the supremacy of its landscape, it still boasted dozens of monuments of granite and marble, countless angels, columns and draped urns; the like of which, sadly, are no longer allowed in modern municipal cemetery regimes.

Burial Searches & Repair/Maintenance

Burial Searches

If you would like to know whether someone is buried in Abney Park Cemetery, please go to our indexing project through the links page. If you would like information about a burial plot and require maps locating that plot, then we can carry out a search for you for an £8 fee per plot - please send enquiries to 'The Abney Park Cemetery Trust', The South Lodge, Abney Park Cemetery, Stoke Newington High Street, London N16 0LN (cheques should be made payable to 'Abney Park Cemetery Trust').

Repair & Maintenance

The Trust's Management Plan for Abney Park encourages sympathetic repair of monuments by the Council and Trust. The Council or Trust can give permission for repairs to relevent charites and societies with an ineterest in monument conservation and to relatives of those whose families formerly held plot agreements from the Abney Park Cemetery Company, before its closure in 1978. Monuments may be considered by the Trust or Council for repair or relocating/redesign if located in in-fill areas, as as nececessary for estate management purposes. The Trust now has its own stone mason who will increasingly be able to offer advice on restoration and design control. Please bear in mind that Abney Park is a statutory Conservation Area and statutory Local Nature Reserve and designs must be approved.

Discuss