 |
gravepix at ukgraves.info |  |
|
gravepix at ukgraves.info | |
You may see where West Brompton is located in this map, courtesy of www.streetmap.co.uk.
Photographer's comments:
Brompton Cemetery is a grand and imposing Victorian cemetery, featuring a mixture of grand old family tombs and vaults,
large and impressive family or individual graves, as well as the more traditional and reasonably-sized graves, such
as will be seen in any church graveyard. Environmentally it has a mixture of well-maintained and closely mown lawn
and areas of a more or less neglected and overgrown nature. I saw little or no evidence of vandalism, and certainly
no evidence of an apparently recent and ridiculous wide-spread practice of pushing tall graves over out of health and safety fears.
The cemetery is situated only minutes from the centre of London, near the western suburbs, which include Kensington
and Earl's Court - indeed, it's right next to the well known and enormous Earl's Court Exhibition Centre.
The cemetery is something of a haven for local wildlife; I saw about a million pigeons - as one will anywhere in London
of course - but also quite a number of large yet very timid black birds, which I am pretty sure are ravens, possibly
on a day trip from the Tower of London, famed for its ravens, and which it is said will collapse should the ravens
ever depart. Top of my wildlife list though has to be the grey squirrels, supposedly vermin, and certainly responsible
for the zero-count of the much less verminous red squirrel, which has all but disappeared from southern England. Whether
they are vermin or not, there are many grey squirrels here at Brompton; they're enormously tame (or should that be bold?)
even cheeky. They will approach you very closely if there's the remotest chance you have anything to eat. I saw a man
wandering about making a peculiar noise, which definitely attracted them; he was giving them peanuts, which they would
all but take from his hand. They seem to be very interested in photography.
The cemetery contains various memorial building, as well as a fine chapel with domed roof. I'm not perfectly sure of the
purpose of the long narrow buildings, or their underground caverns, slopes leading to which you'll see in the pictures. An update: I have received an email from a kind gentleman called Neil Bartlett, who informs me:
"The main reason for emailling is regarding Brompton Cemetery, which I visited yesterday. The long columned buildings you refer too on your website are I believe, called Colonnades which are the above ground structure of the catacombs. If you go down the steps to the cast iron door (of which you photographed), you can peek through the gaps and clearly see rows of Victorian coffins. There are from what I could see five catacombs, one of which was independent from the colonnades and ran along a boundary wall."
Many thanks for this Neil. Now I really wish I had taken the trouble to venture down some of those slopes!
The cemetery has its own unique character; it hasn't the wilderness of Southampton Old Cemetery
or the sheer vastness and beauty of Brookwood, but on the other hand it holds a fascination,
difficult to pin down or describe, not shared by other large cemeteries ..... plus those pesky squirrels!
Some of my pictures are presented in sepia, which I feel is appropriate to this cemetery. The pictures are split up (arbitrarily)
into four separate albums, each containing about 35 pictures, and there is no specific sequence other than that in which
they were taken. I make no apology for the wildlife pictures.
These pictures are all Copyright © 2004/2005 by Gravepix. They were taken on 4 August 2005 using a Canon EOS 300D.
Please click on the following thumbnails to see one of the four individual albums
