THERE IS A SUGGESTIVE theory concerning death and the city. It is supposed by some that the first cities were, in fact, cemeteries; ritual buildings, and that trading booths and dwellings grew up for the mourners and celebrants who had come to these homes of the dead. Thus a city such as London slowly arose. Its origins may then lie in death, its roots emerging from the bodies of the deceased in the earth beneath it. Throughout its history London has been called a city of death, but few realised that they may have been invoking its true nature.

In this sepulchral volume, Catharine Arnold goes on a funereal journey through the graveyard of London. The dead are packed thick beneath our feet. She notes, for example, that the Underground tunnel between Knightsbridge and South Kensington had to be diverted “because it was impossible to drill through the mass of skeletal remains buried in Hyde Park”.

The rituals of death began early in this dark city — there is a Bronze Age tumulus on Parliament Hill Fields. But for many thousands of years before its construction, the Thames was used as a depository of the dead; a stretch of river near Chelsea yielded so many skulls that it was known as “our Celtic Golgotha”. Severed heads were an especial favourite of the river. There are Roman cemeteries at Aldgate, Spitalfields and elsewhere. In other graveyards Saxon lies beside Celt, Celt beside Roman, united in the general desuetude of death.

There have always been too many bodies, the miasmal soil packed to bursting with dissolution and putrefaction. At the time of the Black Death in the 14th century great pits were dug all over the city into which corpses were poured. In a pit near the site of the present Charterhouse, in Smithfield, it is recorded that 50,000 were buried. That must be an overestimate. But the atmosphere of the vicinity is still sombre.

Times Archive 1849: The cholera epidemic

Even as we write, from innumerable burial-grounds within this metropolis pestilential miasmata are steaming up and polluting the air we must breathe

• Metropolitan graveyards

• The condition of London graveyards

Almost every part of London may be haunted ground. Space was so scarce and the population so large that any piece of spare soil was tenanted by the dead as well as the living. Other graveyards became the home for markets or workshops, the activities of the living drawing strength from the presence of the dead.

The sexton became a favourite subject of Elizabethan drama, just as the grave-robber or “resurrection man” became a principal figure in later fiction. There has always been a certain relish in recounting the decay of flesh. Funeral processions were often highly theatrical affairs, with all the pomp of a tribute to King Death and all the pantomime of excessive mourning. That is why Necropolis is deeply pleasing: it satisfies the desire for wayward knowledge, being a compendium of death in all its forms while at the same time providing entertainment of the most garish and exquisite kind.

The Great Plague of 1665 piled Pelion upon the Ossa of decay. It was considered to be divine vengeance upon a sinful city, a biblical pestilence visited upon the ungodly. Divines and moralists were thrilled. There was a shortage of coffins and, of course, a shortage of ground. Once more great pits were built in unconsecrated ground, so that the bodies could be dumped without due ceremony.

Catharine Arnold lists the locations of these plague pits — among them Liverpool Street station, Golden Square, Vincent Square, Broad Street and Poland Street. It is a litany of sorrowful mysteries.

There are fashions in death. A different mortal disease arises in every century and the rituals of burial change with no less frequency. In the 18th century, for example, the undertaking business was established to cater for the more refined tastes of the new merchant classes who did not want to be dispatched in cheap elm boxes. There was no formal training for this exacting trade, however, which required no more than an acceptable manner. Joiners, who made the coffins, often cut out the middle man and conducted the services. Dead babies were stored on shelves until there were enough to warrant a funeral. In the same century, burials became associated with memorials and monuments, often of an extravagant nature. When Horace Walpole saw the mausoleum at Castle Howard, North Yorkshire, he observed that “it would tempt one to be buried alive”.

In the early 19th century, the state of the city churchyards added a new horror to death. Since there were many sites that had possessed a religious foundation for a thousand years, there were many layers to the rich burial cake. Noxious vapours would seep forth from the soil. “Corpse gas” would explode coffins. Limbs would appear. Heads, with pieces of flesh hanging from them, were found lying on the ground. The living breathed the atmosphere of the dead.

It is perhaps not surprising that the demand for suburban cemeteries was quickened. And there were other ambitious schemes. One architect envisaged a giant pyramid on Primrose Hill, which would contain the bodies of five million Londoners neatly stacked in a series of catacombs. It would have been a great feat of mournful and never ending remembrance, highly appropriate for an age in which melancholia and imperial power were mingled.

Nothing could surpass the high funerals of the Victorian age. The Victorians may almost be said to have invented death in its more gorgeous manifestations — with their panoply of black ostrich feathers, glamorous hearses and attendant mute walkers. The whole production was known as “the black job” or “the black coach business”. In 1842 a Patent Funeral Omnibus was invented. The firm of Peter Robinson opened a Mourning Warehouse and, in fact, the unexpected death of Prince Albert instigated a fashion for mourning dress among the ladies of society. It could be worn on any occasion. There also emerged the custom of photographing loved ones on their death-beds.

There is still pleasure to be derived from graveyards. They have their own particular charms. There is the high moral tone of Bunhill Fields, where the graves of Defoe, Bunyan and Blake are found; there is the jungle-like fertility of Abney Park, complete with large rats; there are the theatrical vistas of Brompton and the lugubrious dankness of St Pancras. Their power has not passed. But if you wish to go on a pilgrimage down these gravel paths and among these white sepulchres, this book should be your guide. It is a Baedeker of the dead.

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