St George’s Gardens, London

St George’s Gardens, Camden, London

Visited August 2014

Now a landscaped garden, St George’s Gardens near Kings Cross started life as the burial ground for two central London churches. St George’s Bloomsbury is a Hawksmoor church just off New Oxford Street (Hawksmoor also designed the layout of the burial ground), and St George the Martyr stands on Queen Square. The burial ground was one of the first church burial grounds which was not established next to the church it served. The two churches used separate areas of the cemetery, and a row of marker stones can still be seen dividing the two.

The first burial took place in 1715, and the memorial is still extant. Robert Nelson was a commissioner for building the Fifty New Churches as well as a philanthropist and lay churchman. This encouraged others to use the burial ground, despite its remoteness from the churches, and it was finally closed in 1855. It reopened in 1890 as a public garden, and has been one ever since.

The cemetery has some gruesome episodes in its history. It was here that the recorded case of grave robbing which ended in an indictment took place, in 1777 when the gravedigger and his assistant were jailed for the theft of the body of Mrs Jane Sainsbury from her grave. The cemetery is also the final resting place for Jacobites who were hung drawn and quartered on Kennington Common in 1746, after the defeat at Culloden. A plaque, which I must go back and photograph, reads

“In memory of the officers and gentlemen of the army of Prince Charles Edward Stuart who were executed on Kennington Common in July, August and November 1746. Nine of the Manchester Regiment and seven Scots are buried here. Francis Towneley. Colonel of the Manchester Regiment lies buried in the churchyard of Old St Pancras Church. Tandem Triumphans. The 1745 Association.”

Unlike a number of gardens which have been cleared of their burials, often with just a few stones propped up around boundary walls, St George’s Gardens embrace their past usage with quite a number of tombs still in situ. One of the most important is that of Anna Gibson, the grand-daughter of Oliver Cromwell.