Southwark runs several current and closed cemeteries – Nunhead Cemetery, Camberwell Old Cemetery, Camberwell New Cemetery.
The issues around illegal dumping of building materials nearly resolved with the planting of new bushes etc taking place in October. It’s taken over 18months to get this sorted.
Southwark has only one years supply of spaces for burials.
Officers have options to suggest to provide more burial spaces of either reusing common graves if they obtained Home Office approval – this involves adding 2foot above the current plots (which are only 4 foot deep) with their initial thoughts being using lots of concrete blocks to add the required extra height. This would be contrary to Southwark’s climate change strategy as concrete is a really really high carbon option. This option would give another 10-12 years of burial plots. Seconf option is to use an adjacent sports playing field giving another 25 years of burial plots.
What I hadn’t appreciated is that when you ‘buy’ a plot you’re effectively renting it for 50years. Naively I’d also thought it was for ever. So one option officers will suggest is reducing that 50 year period. That does’nt feel right to me as 50 year is so much shorter than I’d imagine and 50 years should out see most relatives lives.
It’s also suggested Southwark burials are really cheap by London standards. I’m not yet convinced of this. The main price is much cheaper but pricing is so complicated with so many exceptions and extras. Not sure you can compare prices other than the average price which I’ve not seen yet. I recall when the Lib Dems increased prices that the Labour opposition was up in arms so it will be interesting what they propose to solve the lack of burial plots gonig forward without changing prices.
A less pressing problem but bigger is how to permanently improve our cemeteries and take them beyond the drab state they’re currently in.
dont know what you mean by drab, Nunhead is gorgeous. I do hope you dont mean some sort of tidying up, the balance seems about right to me.
On the wider question, there isnt any long-term solution except cremation for everyone or burial outside London. We cant fir an endless supply of dead into a finite space.
Here we go again. Hasn’t anyone worked out that with 60 million people in the Country and a food crisis looming burial is no longer a sustainable option?
Every time Southwark runs out of burial space it refuses to address the issue of long term viability and it ends up taking open space that should be left for the living. The classic example is Honor Oak Recreation Ground.
The trouble being that local politicians haven’t got the balls or intellectual honesty to accept the inconvenient truth that there is no long term future for urban burials.
As for the price of burial plots public open space is priceless and no burial fee will come close to the true social cost.
And when urban Council’s have run out of land what are they going to do? Start using Peckham Rye? A problem never gets any better by being ignored. It only gets worse.
Just what is so wrong with re-using burial plots? Cemeteries become neglected because the connection between the living and the buried breaks down within a couple of generations.
By the way last time Southwark took land at the Honor Oak site they said it would proivde burial spaces for 25 years. That was in 2000. 11 years later we have the same nonsense.
This thread started me thinking about the options.
The most obvious is cremation. It is already common and accepted by most religious groups as an alternative to interment.
Another option, perhaps more controversial, would be vertical burial. The equipment is already widespread for digging pilings, so little needs to be developed to utilise this practice. The footprint for a grave is approximately 8 foot by 3 feet (from observation. Perhaps somebody can confirm the official allowance per plot.). Vertical grave plots could be as small as 3 x 3 feet. This would represent a huge difference in density and extend the life of current cemeteries by a very large amount.
I have also seen a suggestion that, where the geology is suitable, the vertical plots, for family sites, could be made very deep, thus allowing for 5 or more interments the be placed in a vertical column.
Perhaps this is a radical idea, although it has a history and has been started in Australia, apparently, but it could be a possible solution to this current need.