DEATH HEAVEN and the VICTORIANS
"The Lewes Road Cemeteries are hauntingly beautiful. 70 acres of Victorian burial ground are still in regular use as the home of Woodvale Crematorium and for Woodland Burials. Phobe Wells was buried here on December 2nd 1851 in the private Extra-Mural Cemetery. 145,000 souls have followed her, among them Hablot Knight Browne who signed his illustrations "Phiz", and Thomas Hughes QC, author of Tom Brown's Schooldays.In the 1860's J.G. Bishop of the Brighton Herald published his Strolls in the Extra-Mural Cemetery with a journalist's eye for passion, sacrifice, celebrity, murder and monumental grandeur. Now the graves of Henry Ratty, toll collector on the Chain Pier, and the shipwrecked fishermen of 1856 are lost to sight. "Nature's pleasant robe of green enwraps their monuments and their memories." Lost, too, is the stone inscribed from England's champion bareknuckled boxer, Mr. Thomas Sayers, to his mother Maria. a great storm smashed the tombstone of educator, E.J. Marshall and peurile vandalism has defaced the celtic cross of Sussex cycling pioneer, John George Harrison.
The memories swept into this corner of town and preserved among the ivy and weathered stones are our inheritance from polite society and paupers alike. Historian, John Ackerson Erredge's archive at Brighton Reference Library is better preserved than his truncated monument. But, the moving story of Tom M.S.Highflyer, rescued from a slave dhow is still clear to read on his sheltered cross."
Reprinted from Lewes Road Cemeteries - A Walkers Guide by Maire McQueeney
NEXT PUBLIC TOUR
Sunday June 4th 11:30am
THE 'ORIGINAL' BRIGHTON CEMETERY TOUR. A Dickens of a walk through a Victorian Valhalla with special access arranged to Amon Henry Wilds' Gothic Mortuary Chapel, the catacombs, and John Denman's Art Deco Oratory. Eminent Victorians include: illustrator, Hablot Knight Browne; civil engineer, John Urpeth Rastrick and beloved sister of photpgrapher Julia Margaret Cameron, Mrs. Maria Jackson .
START @ Woodvale Cemetery Lodge, off Lewes Road.
Tickets: £5.00/£4.00, concessions, £2.00 accompanied children ages 5-14. Frequency:The First Sunday of every month at 11:30am
EMAIL: mcq20cwalk@mistral.co.uk
THE WOODVALE CEMETERY TOUR. Religious symbolism and secular history abound in this atmospheric back of beyond. Notable graves includes the Ginnett Family Stone Pony, Arthur Douglas Wagner's tractarian cross of 'the London Brighton and South Coast Religion' and Thomas Hughes, author of Tom Brown's Schooldays.
START @Woodvale Cemetery Lodge, off Lewes Road.
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