[10/07/2023]

Maria Rossetti. A name in the shadows of her famous siblings, Dante and Christina, and yet pivotal in their lives and influential in their achievements. An author herself and later a nun, she was her sister’s inspiration for ‘Goblin Market’ [a narrative poem by Christina Rossetti.] All the Rossettis are buried together at Highgate Cemetery except two. Dante, we all know his story… and Maria. Having been consecrated as a nun in around 1870, she was buried in a convent plot at Brompton Cemetery aged only 49. 

[22/02/2023]

I was thrilled to begin my residency with an installation in the Chapel called ‘Hatchings’. This piece is formed from eight-foot high, brightly-coloured ‘feelers’, each shape knitted and supported by an internal structure of wire so that each one can be altered and arranged. 

[15/11/2022]

In 2022 the national meeting of the National Federation of Cemetery Friends took place at Leicester Cemetery, to which the FoBC was invited to send a representative. The following brief history of Leicester cemetery, located at Welford Road, Leicester, sets the scene.

[15/11/2022]

A modest headstone consisting of a double rectangular sandstone plinth, surmounted by a small, naturally weathered tusk of limestone, marks the grave of John Holme Burrow. Educated as a geologist, Burrow amassed an outstanding collection of Age fossils from his native North Yorkshire, the greater part of which now resides in the Sedgwick Museum, Cambridge.

[15/11/2022]

It’s hard not to be intrigued when the place of death recorded in a burial register is ‘The Mortuary, St. Martin’s Lane’ so I had to find out more about what had happened to Charles James Skelton, who is buried in a common grave in the southernmost corner of Brompton Cemetery. When he left home on 8 August 1891, he could not have anticipated that he would be spending the night in a police cell, or the next couple of days dying in a workhouse.