Spring Grove

By Eugene Navakas: 

Winter:

Three mute swans live in this cemetery. We hear one before we see it. It flings itself forward against a stiff, stubborn sheet of surface ice, so fiercely, so indefatigably, that we wonder whether we should help. This is common winter behavior, our phones tell us, not to worry, but the force is so brutal and compulsive, the breast so soft and undefended, that we struggle to believe them. The swan’s face is unreadable. It makes no vocal sound. We’ve seen it in strange postures before⎯once, standing on the steps of a grand mausoleum, gazing into the tomb through a bronze veil of Arts-and-Crafts grape leaves, as if contemplating the past and future and all the world’s lost things⎯but it is, after all, an animal. There is a limit to our ability, however much we may refine it, to understand what it wants.

What we can do is walk. Every Saturday, for twelve months, with our boots we trace trails across 450 acres of hilly parkland devoted to the peculiar mix of feral nature and steady human memorialization. We aren’t the only ones. There are long, snaking funeral corteges for which we respectfully step aside and sometimes halt, arrested by a driving, rhythmic rumble leaking through the windows of a hatchback at the rear. There are joggers, whooshing past in suspended clouds of breath, cheeks flush with wind and cold and the heightened fluency of pounding, reliable hearts. There are even guided tours, groups of five or ten around a single, heavily bundled figure. Sharp mitten-dartings punctuate her recitation, before a familiarly grand mausoleum, about the Canteloupe King within. He grew rich, she says, by using refrigerated rail cars to ship Colorado melons nationwide.

Spring:

In March we turn and gasp at a great blue heron, portent of the coming profusion. It freezes at the lip of a pond, amid sunning turtles, and so do we. The turtles are red-eared sliders, the most popular pet turtles in the United States. They are also among the most damaging invasive species, outcompeting native turtles at great expense to ecosystem biodiversity and even human health, in the form of salmonella infection. The heron is a juvenile, more gently shaded than its maturer counterparts. Instead of blacks and whites, here suffuse more smoky blues and grays, fading as they extend from wing and impossibly sinuous neck to a long spearpoint of orange-bellied beak. The bird stares back at us, sidelong, from the black pit at the center of its banana-bright eye, then flaps up and out over green water⎯gliding, mouth open wide with seeming glee, until resettling, safer, on the far shore. The Eastern Redbuds show early signs of flower, but they’re barely intimations of the riotous, purple future.

Our asphalt path leads straight to May, beneath skies deep as ocean and the soaring, white-hulled wings of turkey vultures. Each branch, now, is fragrant color, sweet with bees. The Higan Cherries weep tears so cream they’re pink, so pink they’re cream, moody and intense as dreams. Around one bend, the stones themselves sprout flowers. Arcing, vibrant, lush cascades of custom, deeply felt bouquets⎯GRAMMY; a can of energy drink; a three-foot baseball; the wreathed photo-print of an ultrasound⎯dazzle gray- and red-granite monuments like stars. Thistles carved in sharp relief peek out behind the floral burst, below all-capped Scottish surnames. Each year, come Memorial Day, Scottish Travelers return to these stones, this parkland cemetery, to mourn and cherish their dead. If you search the digital record, you’ll find a contemptible archive of fear and bigotry, exoticized misunderstanding. An online business magazine tries to link the changing scope and luxury of the annual display to its own broad economic forecast. But if, for a moment, you breathe in the display yourself; if you pause, at respectful distance, on the trip back toward the sliders and the Weeping Cherries; you may feel a sharper, more familiar pang⎯something living, something lost.

Summer:

Summer is a season for the ears. What better place than a graveyard for hungry, roused life to fly shrieking from the ground? Here, specifically, over half a billion Brood X cicadas⎯roughly 1.5 million per acre⎯burrowed into the soil as fresh-hatched nymphs in 2004. For seventeen years, they fed on roots and tree sap less than a foot below the surface, until last week they tunneled up and out. The males broke through first, shedding skins and rapidly contracting tymbals, the clicking reverberators that, in chorus, sync into a jangly, hissing call loud as a motorcycle engine. The females heard that call, and now they’re everywhere. Pavement, grass, bushes, trees. Your car, your hair. Even the chocolate shop uptown, if you’re game for a crunch and can brave a mid-pandemic crowd. Their eyes are ladybugs, glossy red buttons with faint black spots for holes. Or at least that’s what we think their eyes are, until, much later, magnified, we spot the other three. Onscreen, inset like jewels on an igneous plain between submerged red moons, hides a tiny triangular trio. They’re called “ocelli,” simple eyes, and as far as we can see, they distinguish light from dark.

It’s funny how the greenest days, air thick with water, hot with sound, can also feel so full of death. In two short months, the cicadas will have come and gone, their seventeen-year regeneration restarted, today’s lively bodies in stacks like rotting blankets, warming future generations beneath the dirt. One of the most spectacular structures in these half-shorn, half-wild hills is a private Gothic Revival funerary monument built in 1870 in the style of Paris’s medieval Sainte-Chapelle. Its first interment was the English whiskey magnate whose fortune paid for its construction, as well as the transfer of his remains to marble catacombs eight years after initial burial in parts no longer known. On the second floor, above the crypts, sleeps a tall and narrow chapel twelve feet wide but thirty deep and thirty-four high⎯an austere, long-suffering space we’ll likely never see. While even on sweltering, swarming summer afternoons, the exterior remains a popular stage for professional photography, the heavy doors stay locked, the wrought-iron gates chained. Brides and grooms and Instagram influencers grin wide before the retreating flying buttresses of a family in disrepair. Just three Brood-X life-cycles after the building’s birth, the magnate’s granddaughter tried, and failed, to have it razed.

Fall:

It’s not hidden, but it takes a little looking to find the graves of Levi and Catherine Coffin, unmarked until 1902, when a memorial was erected in personal tribute by the city of Cincinnati’s Black population. During the forty-one years from their marriage to the end of the Civil War, the Coffins aided 3,000 enslaved people as they risked their lives in search of freedom. The Coffins’ home in Fountain City, Indiana became known as the Grand Central Station of the Underground Railroad. Levi himself was often called its President. The landmark we use to return to this quiet, shattering spot⎯just seven miles north of the Ohio River and the Mason-Dixon, the old, antebellum border⎯beckons only a few paces away. A fat, trunk-like branch radiates out like a sine wave from the base of a squat tree. It skims briefly above the trimmed, leaf-pocked grass, then dives, submerged, before again swooping back up. So much of Autumn feels between. Leaves turning, half-glorious, half-gone.

Our air comes quick, our tendons groan, as we lean ahead into the circuit’s final stretch. The trees buoy us⎯great oaks and beeches; sycamores; maples; a prodigious, solitary September elm, a national champion⎯as if a god would compete. Pixelated crests of red and orange, green and yellow, each shade just slightly tilted off of true, draw up our eyes to the spotlit, golden-hour sunbursts of hunting hawks. Closer to our feet, a labored scurry. A groundhog galumphs through underbrush and disappears. A frog’s twin bulbs peep up like periscopes above a dollhouse sea, then quickly dive and vanish. Around a corner, flustered scrabbling from a bewildered flock of spindle-legged turkeys, surprised from their leisure beneath the awning of a portable funeral tent. A mermaid rises from a harp atop a bed of kelp and conch and a guardian ring of dolphins. Louisa Lawson fished her out from marble in 1887. Now she decorates the tomb of the world’s once-largest manufacturer of architectural sheet metal. In the end, however, we return to the swans⎯which today, though on opposite sides, all share the same turbid, algal pool. There’s a kind of paradox to writing through the seasons. A temptation to squeeze shape from a cycle that never stops. We turn away and keep walking.

***

Eugene Navakas is a lit. Ph.D. turned TV writer who splits time between Oxford, Ohio and Los Angeles, California. His 2020 crime drama pilot script GALAPAGOS, TEXAS was recognized on Kyle's List here, and his dramedy pilot script EXPECTATIONS won the 2016 UCLA Extension TV Pilot Writing Competition. He also updated and co-performed a 19th-c. folk song about coral, which was featured on a podcast hosted by the Newberry Library in conjunction with his wife's academic environmental research here.

Sheffield General Cemetery

By Sarah Alwin:

Walking is a habit that I have come to appreciate more as I have grown older, being perhaps more naturally attuned to the lure of the motor vehicle and a slightly horrified witness to the end of its golden age. The first time I was allowed behind the wheel of my parents’ car was when I was seventeen in 1995. It was a Honda Civic which my mum had astutely insisted on buying over any other make as it had been Car of the Year in 1984. It was a terrifying experience for my dad, even though we were in the relative safety of a deserted car park near where we lived on the breezy West Coast of Singapore. In fact it had such an impact on us both that I didn’t actually learn to drive until I was almost 21 and my dad played no further part in it, having died not long after that first test drive, though not as the result of trauma from that event I should add. It’s one of my funnier, fonder memories of him: his pulling up the handbrake and telling me that perhaps this was enough and shouldn’t we head back for dinner, to which, shell-shocked, I agreed without protest. I have always liked to jump in a car, either as a passenger inevitably nodding off to the soporific rhythms of the engine like a milk addled baby or as the driver, the promise of excitement just round the corner, armed with an A to Z or roadmap. Even the routine commute to work has in the past had the appeal of solidarity and often hilarity generated by the car pool or when undertaken solitarily as in recent years, the moments of quiet, cocooned in the seal of the horseless carriage, speeding down the motorway, or, more usually, stuck in rush hour traffic.

Now middle age has allowed me to enjoy a walk more. I used to run, and felt good doing it. Until I didn’t. My knees and hips still protest at the damage done running daily in my thirties, and my body in its forties has so far appreciated a good walk instead. And so the whoosh and vroom of my wheels or the urgency of the run has given way to the slower, more wholesome pleasures of a ramble. I have a lovely friend who once told me that she was a committed pedestrian and even though I rolled my eyes internally, she really meant it so that I wouldn’t go out of my way to give her a lift and I do appreciate her turn of phrase. I am certainly not a committed pedestrian (yet!) but may be one day.

In this one respect — walking a round walk — I was quite well prepared for the UK brand of lockdowns in the pandemic, switching to daily walking once for an hour in that first iteration of restrictions with relative ease in comparison to all the other adjustments life had in store during those slightly surreal times. I rediscovered some windy snickets and lesser used paths in those bright days when the weather was just uncharacteristically gorgeous, cloudless, and un-English, walking for pleasure and release rather than to work.

During consecutive rounds of restrictions I found a favourite walk and a place of sanctuary and intense contentment. I avoided the more popular parks, eschewing them in favour of the quieter spots near my home. This takes me neatly to the Sheffield General Cemetery, or ‘gen-cem’ as it is sometimes affectionately known. It is probably my closest green space and woefully underused by the many people who live in the vicinity. My children have been going there for years, first to hobble round the gravestones when they were toddlers, and then latterly unaccompanied by me to meet friends for football in the often overgrown central patch of grass which flattery would call a field. It turns out that this open grassy area had many more graves on it until the 1970s when some bright spark bought up the land, wanted to build houses on it, cleared the headstones (but not the remains!), applied for planning permission, didn’t get it, sold the land for a nominal fee back to the council... In all, between the cemetery’s inception in 1834, its opening in 1836 and its closure in 1978, 87,000 people were buried there, which is hard to believe given its diminutive acreage.

The Gatehouse – Sheffield General Cemetery.

There’s a wonderful radio programme by Tania Hershman, Who Will Call Me Beloved? (you should definitely check it out on BBC Sounds) and I listened to it for the first time on my way to swimming, taking a shortcut through the cem. It was recommended to me by a friend, Shaun, who I have only met briefly, once, at a conference but he was so warm and kind and I follow him on Twitter, and he is somehow part of my life now, exemplifying the very best and most miraculous part of social media. The programme is beautiful and Hershman contemplates what she would like inscribed on her gravestone as she walks through and discovers more about the lives of the people buried in the Southern Cemetery in Manchester. The first time I listened to it I had just read Bee Reaved by Dodie Bellamy which is a selection of her essays about the death (and life) of her lifelong partner Kevin Killian. Bellamy writes so beautifully and disgustingly about everything, not just death, and this book stays with me in my head and my heart. Hershman’s is a moving programme which sits well in tandem with Bellamy actually, about love and living and remembrance and I have listened to it more than a few times as I make my way around the cem. I like the sound of Hershman’s voice: soothing and serious, reflective and exploratory. It’s a multi-sensory experience and I like the juxtaposition of other people’s lives in Manchester on the lives of those lying in the gen-cem here in Sheffield. I like to listen to podcasts on the way round or actually mainly French synthy pop or any kind of easy dance music of the reassuringly numbing variety so that I don’t have to concentrate on lyrics but can walk to a standard four-four rhythm and allow my deep fried brain a gentle haziness. It’s leafy and quiet and there’s always a sense of calm even if on the odd occasion you catch a gathering of fervent dogs and their walkers or the enthusiastically demented toddlers from the nearby forest school schlepping about in all weathers.

The cemetery is not a maudlin place for me; rather it is one for contemplation before work or unwinding after. Sometimes it is a cool, shaded route to Ecclesall Road for the bus or shopping, and other times it is the shortcut to the railway station or town. Mostly though it’s a pleasant and extremely short round walk, a way of recharging efficiently. It is beautiful in all weathers, especially in winter when the bright of the snow sets off the gothic and abandoned Anglican chapel at the top of the cem so dramatically. 

The Anglican Chapel looking extra Gothic in the winter.

Another wintery snap – the cemetery is teeming with life all year round.

Recently, long overdue works have begun to shore up the foundations of some of the structures in the cemetery: repairs to the catacombs, walkways, and some of the more sumptuous and overwrought memorials. This work has disrupted my walks, taking me on different paths as JCBs and workmen close down familiar routes. The voluntary team from the Sheffield General Cemetery Trust who tend the cemetery so dutifully continue their talks and events with good cheer and so it happens that I attend one at the start of August on a bright, hot afternoon with my mother who I have not seen for three years to find out a little about the history of the gen-cem and its inhabitants.

The ongoing works to the cemetery … sometimes taking me on different paths.

The catacombs were not that popular as a final resting place – they were an idea borrowed from France that didn’t travel so well. Nonetheless work is being undertaken to avoid their collapse here.

The loveliest thing about this tour is that it reminds me that Sheffield is a place not only of industry but also, necessarily, of subversion. There are many beautiful monuments to the big names of the men who were cornerstones of the economic success of this city, but most pulsating, poignant, belligerent of all is the more modest grave stone of the Chartist and agitator, Samuel Holberry, who died in York Castle at the tender age of 27 after being made to work the treadmill illegally, a punishment which sounds barbaric and desperate. Peter Wingfield, our volunteer tour guide, tells us that in death, Holberry became a martyr and 50,000 people came to the funeral, which was a big deal at a time when the entire population of Sheffield only totaled 150,000. The Chartists were trying to secure the vote for working men. It is so moving to see Holberry’s headstone which is in the non-conformist section of the cemetery and today reads as urgently as ever: a utopian, idealistic epitaph. 

The Samuel Holberry grave

His headstone reads:

SACRED
Is the Memory of
SAMUEL HOLBERRY

WHO AT THAT EARLY AGE OF 27 DIED
IN YORK CASTLE, AFTER SUFFERING
AN IMPRISONMENT OF 2 YEARS AND 8
MONTHS, JUNE 21st 1842,
FOR ADVOCATING WHAT TO HIM APPEARED
TO BE THE TRUE INTEREST OF THE PEOPLE OF
ENGLAND
VANISHED IS THE FEVERISH DREAM OF LIFE:-
THE RICH AND POOR FIND NO DISTINCTION HERE,
THE GREAT AND LOWLY END THEIR CARE AND STRIFE
THE WELL BELOVED MAY HAVE AFFECTIONS TEAR
BUT AT THE LAST, THE OPRESSOR AND THE SLAVE
SHALL EQUAL STAND BEFORE THE BAR OF GOD:
OF HIM, WHO LIFE, AND HOPE, AND FREEDOM GAVE,
TO ALL THAT THRO’ THIS VALE OF TEARS HAVE TROD.
LET NONE WHEN MURMUR ’GAINST THE WISE DECREE
THAT OPEN’D THE DOOR, AND SET THE CAPTIVE FREE.

Also of SAMUEL JOHN, his son who
Died in his infancy.

This tablet was erected by his bereft widow.

I love the ornate language, particularly the line vanished is the feverish dream of life, which I will later embroider onto a tote bag in the evening while watching Netflix or cricket. Many founding fathers of Sheffield, and great men and women are buried here. But this is the one final resting space that feels the most remarkable to me, and I was glad to have taken the time to attend the tour if only to know about this grave. The Sheffield General Cemetery Trust started as the Friends of the General Cemetery and is run entirely by volunteers. They are cool people.

We leave Peter and the rest of the tour at the refurbished non-conformist Samuel Worth Chapel, where there are teas and cakes laid out for weekend visitors. He tells me quietly and generously that if I want to know anything more I can come and find any of them by the main Gatehouse on Tuesdays, as that is when the volunteers meet to garden and tend to the grounds. You could bob down there too if you are in Sheffield and want a moment of quiet and a gentle, shaded walk. You might see me stalking Holberry’s graveside or haunting the gloomy Anglican Chapel before work.

You can find out more about the Sheffield General Cemetery and the work of the Sheffield General Cemetery Trust here: gencem.org

***

Sarah Alwin is a special needs teacher and PhD researcher working on domestic space in South East Asian literature. She is half Dutch and half Singaporean and has lived in Sheffield for 27 years. She co-produces and co-hosts a weekly review programme, Radioactive, on a community radio station, Sheffield Live 93.2FM.

Border Crossing

By Martin Ransley:

Often, on Sunday mornings, I’m usually the first to duck beneath the colonnade arch, ascend the steep steps - making the transition from the land of the living to the land of the dead. As if the steps, and hill, the cemetery is built on help those, who believe in such things, that they are already on their way to heaven. Almost all visitors to Highgate Cemetery do exactly same, because the gothic arch at the entrance, linking the two chapels, gently guides visitors directly toward Bunning’s simply designed arch; treading a path mourners have respectfully trod since 1839. 

Once the transition is accomplished, visitors struggle to orientate themselves, as their senses become overwhelmed by the sight, sound, scent, and sheer beauty of the place. Change is sensed immediately; the air cools, light darkens, and from early March there is a scent of wild garlic – not as defence against vampires - there are none at Highgate, but because the ground offers perfect growing conditions, where it thrives in abundance, until its delicate, white flowers begin to fade in late May. Then, surprisingly, there are sounds of life heard among the trees and undergrowth. A blackbird, almost always first to break the dawn with its wistful, melancholic call; then a robin calls out with sweet, cheery short bursts of song. The bittersweet notes of native birds are often rudely interrupted by the squawking of parakeets, which some say, despite beautiful colouring, lower the tone somewhat, and threaten the inherent harmony of place. 

Then there are the stones looming out of the undergrowth: granite, slate, sandstone, marble; occasionally wooden markers in the shape of a cross - sometimes a shrub marks a grave, which flower annually and takes on a significance of its own. These markers signify something – a meaning - a language uniquely theirs. Highgate cemetery is a curious place, and a place for the curious, who, when they enter, embark on a journey, a quest to find answers - each stone, every marker begs a question, who am I, what did I do, am I remembered? That is the purpose of being here – an abiding memorial to remind relatives, friends and visitors of their status, and to pray for them in perpetuity, until an angel, perched above a grave, reaches for her horn and blows. 

Few do, though. Initially a grave is marked with a wooden cross, and remains in place for six months, sometimes a year; allowing the ground to settle before a permanent memorial is erected to commemorate the terminus of the corpse below. That is what the grave is, a terminus, generally understood as an endpoint, and for Victorian believers, signified a final border-crossing– or a first step on the stairway to heaven.  Twenty percent of wooden crosses, though, remain the only indication a burial has taken place. Visits become infrequent and then cease. Perhaps, relatives are reluctant to return to graveside and reawaken recent sorrows, or, maybe, the cost of a stone memorial is no longer justifiable for those faced with an acceleration in the cost of living in this world. Then again, once grief subsides, maybe remembrance occurs in the imagination, and the grave loses its function for contemplation of loss and silent reflection. Memories of the dead emerge randomly while taking the children to school, putting the rubbish out, or maybe not at all, and memories drift - forgotten – lost to history. It is reckoned after fifteen years, no relative or friend visit the stones, leaving them for the curiosity of visitors; those curious of knowing more. 

Suddenly there are splashes of colour - red, yellow, green. A bouquet left on a stone, in fact two, in different sections of the cemetery – graves from a time which no longer exists! No card attached with a fond message or signature. Anonymous. Whoever left them, the living certainly doesn’t need to know who was responsible for floral tributes reaching out through time. More questions for the curious – who, why? Surely not a token of grief – can grief be passed down through generations? 

One possibility is whoever found the stone, had been searching for ancestors, curious about those who had preceded them, and found a name – a continuity with the past linking them – an affirmation of identity, and the laying of flowers, heralds a prodigal return, albeit momentarily, paying a final tribute to an ancestor, a last hurrah of remembrance, one final trump. And what was lost, is now found, and their descendants might tell others what they did and how it was done. Maybe, a reaction will be set in motion – perhaps others will become curious and embark on a search for those who have gone before them and leave flowers in celebration of shared identity and a past, or perhaps not.

***

Martin completed a BA in English Literature at Birkbeck College in 2019 and is a former teacher. He lives in North London and swims, each morning, at a local lido during the winter months. Once spring arrives, he migrates to the ponds on Hampstead Heath. While cycling there, swimming, and then returning, ideas for writing form, which he writes down on his return. Border Crossing is the result of the method, such as it is! He is a guide at Highgate Cemetery.

Strange City: Thomas Willson and the Primrose Hill Pyramid

Artwork: Laura Haines

By Dan Carney:

In the late 18th and early 19th Centuries, increased migration into London and rising fertility rates caused the city’s population to almost double, from 750,000 in 1760 to 1.4m by 1815. Burial space was at a premium. London’s graveyards, generally centuries old, were already foul smelling and disease-ridden, overpopulated and unfit for purpose. Bodies were buried on top of others, with older corpses sometimes even exhumed, then scattered, in order to make space for fresh ones. By the 1820s, with the widespread implementation of cremation still several decades away, it was clear that the problem had grown too pressing to ignore. A lively public discussion was underway regarding the reformation of interment practices. 

A popular idea was the building of large out-of-town garden-style cemeteries - something first considered over one hundred years earlier by Christopher Wren - but architect Thomas Willson suggested an alternative solution. Inspired by the craze for ancient Egypt that was sweeping Europe, Willson proposed the construction of a vast pyramid mausoleum atop Primrose Hill. With a 40-acre base as large as Russell Square and a height of 1500 feet (four times the height of St. Paul’s), the 94-storey, granite-faced structure would contain 215,219 storage vaults, arranged honeycomb-like along concentric corridors, accessed via ramps and hydraulically powered lifts. There would be capacity for five million bodies, as many as could be interred in a more conventional 1000-acre “horizontal” cemetery. At the summit would be an astronomical observatory.

Willson first exhibited his idea at the Kings Mews exhibition space at Charing Cross in 1828 before publishing the plans in full two years later. He described his pyramid as a “coup d’oeil of sepulchral significance unequalled in this world”. It would “teach the living to die, and the dying to live forever”, and be the centerpiece of an ornamental site, where families coming to pay their respects to loved ones could picnic on the grass outside. It would also offer investors the chance to make a killing - freehold vaults would cost between £100 and £500, depending on size and location, with further income generated by leasing additional vaults to parishes. Willson estimated that, once filled - at a rate of around 40,000 burials annually for 125 years - his structure would bring in a profit of almost £8.2m. He set up the Pyramid General Cemetery Company in order to promote the project to interested parties. 

Reactions to Willson’s ideas were mixed. The London Literary Gazette was unequivocally hostile, writing: “This monstrous piece of folly, the object of which is to have generations rotting in one vast pyramid of death… is perhaps the most ridiculous of the schemes broached in our scheming age.” One prominent figure in the burial reform movement, John Claudius Loudon, was impressed with the capacity but also had reservations. Writing in the Morning Advertiser, Loudon feared the expulsion of foul-smelling gasses – “mephitic exhalations” - and was also perturbed by the idea of bodies being buried away from the earth, in “…any way which prevents the body from speedily returning to its primitive elements, and becoming useful by entering into new combinations – vegetable, mineral, or even animal, in aquatic burial.”

Willson’s plans went as far as being presented to parliament in 1830, but interest ultimately petered out, with planners and architects favouring the idea of garden cemeteries. Willson, however, persisted, resurfacing over two decades later at the Great Exhibition in Crystal Palace in 1851 with a model of a “Great Victoria Pyramid” mausoleum, earmarked for Woking Common but similar to his previous plan in most other ways. The project received favourable press coverage and another attempt was made to find investors, but interest again waned. Willson’s last sepulchral pyramid-related activity appears to have been in 1853, when he was accused of defrauding a young man called James Sykes, who had offered a £200 inducement loan to anyone offering him employment. Willson hired Sykes in the office of a “British Pyramid National Necropolis Company”, and had received the money, but had fired him several months later with no sign of repayment. Willson died in 1866, but his idea endured, at least in his own family. His son Thomas, also an architect, submitted a plan in 1882 for a pyramidal mausoleum to house the body of the recently assassinated US President James Garfield. Garfield’s widow was, however, unimpressed, and chose another design for her husband’s final resting place.  

Although the likes of Kensal Rise, Highgate, and the City of London demonstrate that the garden cemetery enthusiasts won the argument, Willson’s abandoned plans offer an intriguing insight into an alternate London, one in which his pyramidal sepulchre – taller than The Shard – would be the highest building in the city (and third highest in Europe), one of its most debated and controversial structures. The designer Laura Haines offers a glimpse into this parallel world in her 2016 project Metropolitan Sepulchre, envisaging the vast structure amidst the Blitz, then surviving as a tourist attraction, dominating the modern skyline. 

The Egyptian theme may have been a voguish peculiarity of the era, but with burial space running out in cities all over the world, particularly those high in populations for whom cremation is taboo, the idea of vertical burial structures in London – or its vicinity - may one day resurface. Some boroughs are now completely out of space and are “recycling” existing plots, back to burying fresh bodies on top of old. Vertical burial methods have been used in other cities for a while. The world’s tallest cemetery, the Memorial Necrópole Ecumênica in Santos, Brazil, opened in 1983 and hosts around 16,000 burial units over 14 storeys. Current extension plans will see it rise when complete to 32 storeys, with space for 25,000 units. Echoing Willson’s vision of his pyramid as part leisure destination, the building also features a tropical garden, with turtles and a waterfall, as well as a classic car museum. 

In Petah Tikva, Israel, a 22-metre high structure at the Yarkon cemetery offers space for 250,000 bodies, with Judaism’s requirement that bodies be buried in earth cleverly fulfilled by dirt-filled pipes inside the building’s columns, technically connecting each layer to the ground. The six-storey Kouanji Buddhist temple in Tokyo requires mourners to use swipe cards to have their loved ones’ remains delivered to them via a conveyor belt system. Ideas for vertical burial structures have also been seriously discussed in cities as diverse as Mumbai, Paris, Oslo, Mexico City, and Verona. It may be that Thomas Willson’s ideas, usually a strange footnote in articles on unrealized buildings or 19th Century Egyptian Revival architecture, were simply slightly ahead of their time. 

***

Dan Carney is a writer, musician, and lecturer from northeast London. He has released two albums as Astronauts via the Lo Recordings label, and also works as a composer/producer of music for TV and film. His work has been heard on a range of television networks, including BBC, ITV, Channel 4, HBO, Sky, and Discovery. He has also worked as an academic psychology researcher, and has authored articles on subjects such as cognitive processing in genetic syndromes and special skills in autism. His other interests include walking, hanging around in cafes, and spending far too much time thinking about Tottenham Hotspur.

Dispatches from Olsztyn - Practitioners

By Marcel Krueger:

This year, I have been selected as the official writer in residence of Olsztyn in Poland by the German Culture Forum for Eastern Europe, and until September I will be living here, observing, taking part in cultural activities organised by my local partners the City of Olsztyn and the Borussia Foundation, and of course writing about the city. You can find regular posts over on the official writer in residence blog www.stadtschreiber-allenstein.de in German, Englisch and Polish (thanks to my official translator a.k.a. my Polish voice Barbara Sapala). But I will also write irregular dispatches from Olsztyn for the Elsewhere blog. As an amuse gueule, here is one of my first pieces for the Stadtschreiber blog, about a wander along the local river.

***

“Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

I like walking. This seems to be an odd statement, given that anyone does that on a daily basis. But I think we don’t walk enough these days, and not consciously enough. Or, as writer and editor Paul Sullivan writes in his essay Walking the City:

Like writing someone a letter by hand, visiting a friend across town spontaneously or just sitting on a bench and watching the world go by, the act of meandering slowly through the city streets with no particular destination in mind is one of life’s simple pleasures – and an almost entirely lost art. While most of us would argue that we do stroll through the city to some extent – to the post office, through the park, around the block – a combination of factors, chief among them a general deficit of leisure time and an abundance of convenient public transport options, conspire to ensure we usually don’t get very far on foot.

So during my first week in Olsztyn I did what I always do when I want to learn about a place: I went for a walk. I actually went on a walk every day, though some days I cheated by taking a bus or the tram. I first drew circles in and around the old town with my feet, exploring the main thoroughfares and shopping centres, but also the back alleys, laneways and suburbs of the city.

For me, someone who is now living in a central location and without a car, Olsztyn really is a city that lends itself to walking. The new parks along the Łyna river (the German Alle) are pleasant places to stroll and to linger, and on Friday afternoon there where students and teenagers sitting under bridges or on the wooden steps that lead down to the water, swigging from beer cans and smoking; office workers on their lunch break sat on benches and licked ice cream, parents leisurely pushed buggies along the pathways left and right of the river.

From the parks, I then walked northwards, past the castle from 1346 and the Warmia brewery from in a former mill building from 1868, and finally under the railway viaducts from 1871 and 1893 and the newer road bridges into the city forest proper. Every time I see the viaducts I’m reminded of Robert Budzinki’s tongue-in-cheek travel book 'Die Entdeckung Ostpreußens' (The Discovery of East Prussia).

Budzinski (1874 -1955) was a painter, graphic artist and author, and – even though he himself was born in East Prussia in Klein-Schläfken (Sławka Mała today) – in 1913 published his 'travel book' which is not only full of wonderful woodcuts, but also sardonically talks about East Prussia as the proverbial distant eastern province. He also records the often exotic-sounding East Prussian place names, before they were 'Germanised' by the Nazis 20 years later:

During my wanderings I continuously discovered places with not very known but quite illustrious names; so that I often thought I was roving about in a magical landscape. One day I took the train from Groß-Aschnaggern to Liegentrocken, Willpischken, Pusperschkallen and Katrinigkeiten, breakfasted in Karkeln, arrived in Pissanitzen, Bammeln, Babbeln, and had dinner in Pschintschikowsken while aiming to overnight in Karßamupchen.

The book remains in print until today, which I think is a testament to his enduring humour and skill as an artist. From under the bridges then I made my way into the city forest proper, with the Łyna growing wider to my right and only the occasional biker disturbing my solitude. I like to be out, walking, slightly removed from the noise of the world. Or, as Walter Benjamin writes in 'Berlin Childhood around 1900', 'Not to find one’s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires some schooling.' The beauty of Olsztyn is that the forest proper is never far – so I can train to get lost both here and in the city. The lady walking her dog just that came towards me on the forest path did not seem to agree with my Waldeinsamkeit: the look she gave me over the rim of her sunglasses seemed to suggest that only idiots stand in the middle of a forest and scribble in notebooks.

I continued for another 30 minutes before I decided to leave the Łyna valley and loop back to the city centre. I walked up the wooden slope right of the river and came across the Leśny Stadium, now almost completely reclaimed by grass and trees, where athlete Józef Szmidt (the so-called 'Silesian Kangaroo', born in 1935 and an honorary citizen of Olsztyn today) broke the world record for triple jump in 1960 with a length of 17.03 metres. I wonder if the soft peat soil here had something to do with that. Further on, I came across a graffiti of three knights on a wall, maybe a harmless reflection of the Teutonic Knights that haunted these woods long ago.

A not so harmless reminder of the violent past was just up the road – two cemeteries of honour, one a German one with dead from both World Wars that was restored and is looked after by the German Minority Association of Olsztyn, with men who died in 1914 lying next to men who were born in 1914; and the other a small Russian plot, with no headstones left but a German memorial set up in 1914 that reads:

Here rest Russian soldiers who followed the orders of their ruler, found their death fighting against the liberators of East Prussia and are now buried far from their home

It seems a futile honourable gesture, something that would have surely not been set up following the industrialised mass murder of the Somme and Verdun and during the Brussilov offensive, which surely eradicated all humanity left then.

When I walked back from the cemeteries, my head full of somber thoughts, chance and sunlight and the city cheered me up: a pizza taxi stopped near the forest entrance and two teenage girls emerged from the woods, inexplicably wearing white plastic antennae and white plastic fairy wings. They paid for the pizza and skipped back into the woods, to what I can only imagine must have been the first fairy pizza picnic of spring in Olsztyn this year.

In Olšany Cemetery

By Anna Evans:

On a weekend trip to Prague they decide to walk in the cemetery near where they are staying in Prague 3. They agree to set out early, visit the cemetery, and then to continue with their day. It is October, an early morning chill in the air, but already the sunlight is beginning to glance down with a nod, promising warmth, an unexpected dawning of late summer spells.

She reads aloud from her book, ‘See, the first line mentions the cemetery…  listen, it says…’ She hasn’t made it very far with the book yet, but is glad to be reading a Czech author. There is something about this place, she thinks. I would like to get to know this city and its complex history; this city of writers and of walking.

Leaving their apartment building, they can see the wall of the cemetery in front of them and trees behind. Crossing the road they find an entrance at the end of the street.

It is one of those rare times when both agree that this is the only place they really want to be, that given the chance they wouldn’t be anywhere else. They listen carefully to the other’s remarks and laugh together as two people who know and understand each other. They agree that it’s good to be away from home, that the best feeling of all is the day stretching out in front of them, the city to explore. The feeling of waking early in a new place, that sense of accomplishment. The promise of black coffee and the warming smell of baking bread. There is a route planned on a map, the streets of Prague, its art nouveau buildings a perfect tapestry through which to wander, to the sound of passing trams.

The trees are filters for the sunlight, and leaves are beginning to cover everything. Wandering along the paths, the gravestones draped in ivy but without the sense of neglect and desperate wildness some cemeteries have.

Those strange eruptions from the ground growing amongst the trees, marble and stone of different shapes and sizes with pathways running between. They are like city streets, laid out in blocks with signs, and all the leaves swept away. Sometimes the graves look like grand city houses. ‘How funny that money and status should continue to follow us into death,’ he says, and they pause, thinking of the years sliding past them.

Walking and reading the stones, thinking about what draws people to cemeteries, trying to describe the sense of peace and watchfulness it brings. There are those tending the graves of family, holding in their hands the span of remembrance; like the flowers they lay down, for as long as their transient bodies remain. The green force flowing through the stems cut off already from their source of life.

Looking at the names on the gravestones, reading the history of families, through the years engraved in stone. Of lost children, and married couples who died within months of one another.

Cemeteries are really places for the living.

Connected to our beginnings and ends, people wander through cemeteries to be close to those who are no longer here. Each city, each place, contains the imprints of all those who have walked its streets and all those yet to come, the ghosts of history who are with us even now. In some places we are more aware of them than others.

Confronting their mortality, but feeling life urging its way through their bodies, they walk around, knowing they will leave and continue the day, saying farewell to those in ivy-covered slumber.

Reaching the main entrance, the sun warmer and brighter, rising higher in the morning sky.  The sound of traffic from the road nearby and people walking past. Soon they will join the movement of the city streets and the day will glide by in all its colours.

For a moment though, they pause and look back. They both know how quickly and how easily the shadow beckons and can fall between them. Like feeling cold on a sunny day, like voices interrupting from the past, ghosts of time and distance.

About the author:
Anna Evans is a writer and researcher from Huddersfield in the north of England, currently living in Cambridge. Her interests are in migration and literature, cities and movement, and she completed an MA in ‘Writing the Modern World’ at the University of East Anglia in 2017. She is currently working on a project on the places in Jean Rhys’s fiction. 

Late of Kings Turning

By David Lewis:

One grey day in early summer I found myself unexpectedly alone, so I stole a long day to go walking and exploring.  The town was quiet and warm, and the air was scented with the rich musk of lilac and a soft suggestion of wisteria.  Great pale purple bunches hung over the road and curved gently across the faces of old houses.  The country lanes were bordered by long grasses and frothy, gentle wild flowers - cow parsley, herb Robert, buttercups.  The hedge thickened around an overgrown brick step and a sturdy white iron gate, as the ground rose into the cemetery.

We all have cemetery stories, ancestor tales.  My maternal grandparents and great grandparents are buried in a sloping graveyard overlooking the Welsh town of Llangollen, but my Lewis ancestors were either cremated or lie in an unmarked grave in Toxteth Cemetery, Liverpool.  There is a poetry in these places, the poetry of time and loss and hope, stories told in grass or written on stone pages.  Far from being depressing places, cemeteries are full of wildflowers and a rich meditative silence broken only by the birds.

This was a very Protestant cemetery and I saw only one Catholic crucifix on my slow walk.  Carved from the local grey-brown stone, the heavy Victorian headstones were sombrely decorated with calligraphy and curlicues rather than angels, although many headstones wore small panels of spring flowers, symbolic of Easter and the Resurrection, an eternal stone garden mirroring the lush greenery in the hedgerows outside.  The headstones’ crisp edges had been softened by a hundred Welsh winters, and names and dates were fading beneath lichens and mosses.  As a landscape it was defined by giant yew trees, dark and gloomy, beneath which the grave plots were widely spaced, a lawn sprinkled with tombs.  Gothic ironwork disappeared into thick ivy; older tombs were smothered by wild undergrowth.  There were more Celtic crosses than in an English cemetery, but very few Welsh inscriptions.

Yet the stories reached back through time to the landscape around the town.  Older graves were often carved with the names of large houses, hill farms and town houses, places I passed daily.  Bridge House, Stapleton Court, Tan House.  Late of Kings Turning, read one.  In this border cemetery the names were Welsh and English – Hatfield, Davies, Jones and Roberts – and I found many Thomas Lewises, my paternal great grandfather in that unmarked Liverpool grave.  Many families were haunted by infant mortality, the children’s lives cut short which sadden all visitors to a nineteenth-century graveyard.

But in rural Wales, the dead are part of the stories of the living and old stories fade slowly.  King’s Turning is a bend in the road, a field, a footpath on the outskirts of town, named for a fleeting visit by Charles 1st, so the story goes.  Welsh family storytelling creates a weave of story unconnected to chronological time, in which the dead are present through story and anecdote.  In Wales, as in William Faulkner’s Deep South, the past isn’t dead, it’s not even the past.

David Lewis has written five books of history/landscape/psychogeography about his native Liverpool and Merseyside.  He posts urban/rural images on Instagram - davidlewis4168 and mutters about the world on Twitter - @dlewiswriter

Mystical Mount Koya

IMAGE: Pete Martin

By Pete Martin: 

Koya-san, which is 857 metres above sea level, is the base for the Shingon Buddhists, an esoteric sect of Buddhists. There are over one hundred and twenty temples on the mountain and there’s been a religious community here since 816. A monk named Kukai, who had studied Buddhism in China, founded the Shingon sect on his return to Japan. Legend has it that he threw his vajra (ritual sceptre) from China and it landed here in the mountains in Wakayama. The Imperial Court subsequently granted that Kukai was to build a place of meditation on the mountain. After his death, Kukai became known as Kobo Daishi. The monks to this day still believe Kobo Daishi to be alive, meditating in his tomb for the arrival of Miroku (the Buddha of the future) and they prepare three meals a day for him in Okunoin cemetery.  

I get off the bus at Okuninguchi for the Okunoin Cemetery. The cemetery is a sacred area and the pathway runs for two kilometres from here to Kobo Daishi's mausoleum. The path is lined with old, tall cedar trees and the cemetery contains over two hundred thousand gravestones and memorial pagodas. The trees are huge and close together blocking the sunlight. The graves are also packed together tightly, the dark grey stone, wood and black-grey marble give an eerie atmosphere. The ground is covered with snow and the base of the trees and the headstones are covered in moss. It’s not a place for anyone who is claustrophobic. The air is fresh, but the whole place is damp and slightly misty, adding to the enchantment. 

There are various signs in English and Japanese describing the legends that abound in the cemetery. This just adds to the ambiance. At the Sugatami-no-Ido (reflection well), legend has it that if a person looks into the well and does not see his reflection then he will die within three years. At the Ksitigsrbha Shrine, the bodhisattva Jizo is the Asekaki Jizo (sweating Jizo). The Buddha is made of black stone and is often moist due to the weather conditions. It is said that the statue is sweating because it bears the sufferings of others for their wrongdoings. At the Zenni Jochi memorial, a visitor can place his ear on the stone and hear the cries in hell. Near the end of the pathway, at the Mizumuke Jizo, the faithful pour water on the statues of the Buddhist deities for the peacefulness of their loved ones. Close to this is the Miroku-ishi, which is a stone that it is said to feel light to virtuous people and heavy to sinful people. I can't tell whether this is true or not, as it’s too heavy for me to lift. 

Along the path there are many gorinto (five-tiered stupas). The five tiers represent the five elements, from bottom to top, of earth, water, fire, wind and space, and these elements form the Buddha Mahavairocana, the fundamental deity of Shingo Buddhism, or the life force that is the origin of everything and that illuminates all. The goal of Shingon is the realization that each one of us is identical to Mahavairocana in nature, a goal achieved through initiation, meditation and esoteric ritual practices. 

Many of the statues have bibs, which provide the only colour in the cemetery. The bibs are placed on the statues by those who have lost children, in prayer to Ojizo-Sama, who is the guardian of children. It is said that the souls of children who die before their parents are unable to cross the mythical Sanzu River, as the children have not been able to undertake enough good deeds. Ojizo-Sama saves these souls from the eternal penance of piling stones on the river bank by hiding the children’s souls in his robes and this is symbolized by the bibs on the statues. 

At the end of the long pathway through the cemetery, there are three wooden temples in front of the stone bridge that leads to Kobo Daishi’s mausoleum. A group of four monks, again in orange robes and geta, walk noisily from temple to temple, stopping to pray and chant at each one. The stone bridge depicts the entrance to the precinct of the mausoleum of Kobo Daishi. The bridge was originally wooden but it’s now rebuilt in stone. It has thirty six stone planks that, with the bridge itself, mark the thirty seven Buddhist deities of the diamond world mandala, which is the representation of the unchanging cosmic principle of the Buddha. 

To the right of the mausoleum, up the steps from the bridge, is the Torodo, the lantern hall. This is a plain wooden building, a modern reconstruction of the prayer chapel of 1023, erected by the disciple Shinzen. In 1016, a poor woman sold her hair to buy a lantern to pray for the rest of her deceased parents. The Emperors, Shirakawa and Showa, donated lanterns also, in 1033 and 1948 respectively. These three lanterns are kept burning continuously in the hall. 

Inside the mausoleum itself, monks sit at stalls at the front copying sutras carefully. The wooden building is dark and atmospheric. Lanterns and pendants hang from the low ceiling. Two monks flank another who sits in the middle of the temple chanting. Incense burns and the only colour is from the orange robes of the monks. I feel I’m encroaching on a sacred service, but another monk waves me forward for a closer view. It feels very spiritual with the chanting and the incense. It even smells other-worldly. I’m apprehensive about intruding further. On my way out, to my embarrassment, I noisily slip on the wet entrance floor. Nobody notices. Outside I catch my breath. The tomb is usually closed. I was only inside for a matter of perhaps five minutes but it felt like time stood still inside. The gobyo (tomb) has an aura that I have felt only in a few other places.

Pete Martin’s book Revolutions: Wandering and wondering on a sabbatical year is a compelling tale of travel and change and is out now. More information can be found at www.wander2wonder.com.