Brompton Cemetery

Brompton Cemetery,
Fulham Rd,
London
SW10 9UG
The Friends of Brompton Cemetery

Brompton Cemetery, consecrated by the Bishop of London in June 1840, is one of Britain's oldest and most distinguished garden cemeteries. The cemetery is Grade I Listed on the English Heritage Register of Historic Parks and Gardens. The 39-acre (16 hectare) site lies between Old Brompton and Fulham Roads in South West London, on the western border of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, then a distant suburb but now a populous and diverse community in the heart of London.

Brompton Cemetery is one of the 'Magnificent Seven' London cemeteries constructed during the 1830's and 1840's to relieve overcrowded burial grounds. The others are: Abney Park, Highgate, Kensal Green, Nunhead, Tower Hamlets and West Norwood. Brompton was the first to have had all its records digitised and made available through a website.

Brompton Cemetery's principal buildings were designed by Benjamin Baud, under the influence of his long association with royal architect Sir Jeffry Wyatville. Time, money and strong opinions conspired against the completion of Baud's grand design, but the site still embodies the vision of the cemetery as an open air cathedral, with the tree-lined Central Avenue as its nave, and the domed Chapel, in honey-coloured Bath Stone, as its high altar. The Chapel, colonnades and Brompton Road gate are all now Grade II* Listed.

Two long colonnades embrace the Great Circle, reputedly inspired by the piazza of St. Peter's in Rome, and shelter catacombs beneath. Narrower paths run like aisles parallel to main axis, shaded by an array of mature trees. Many of these, like the limes on Central Avenues, are as old as the cemetery itself. Specimen plantings have survived in the shelter of the walled site to create the ideal model of the urban garden cemetery as a country park in miniature.

Brompton Cemetery is managed by The Royal Parks, under contract from the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, and is thus Britain's only Crown Cemetery.

Records on Deceased Online

The registers for the Cemetery are held at The National Archives (TNA) and Deceased Online digitally scanned all of these within building in Kew, South West London.

The complete record collection comprises approximately 205,000 burials for the period 1840 to 1997. Deceased Online has both registers and grave details for all of these and, in addition, also includes section maps to help locate graves (even those without memorials) and some photographs of monuments, memorials and headstones.

There are some 35,000 monuments (although many are now illegible), from simple headstones to mortuary chapels, of which 27 are Grade II Listed, and one -- the Leyland tomb by Edward Burne-Jones - is Grade II*. The cemetery embraces all, from large plots for family mausolea to common graves, as well as a small columbarium. Brompton was closed to burials between 1952 and 1996, but is once again a working cemetery, with plots for interments and a Garden of Remembrance for the deposit of cremated remains.

There are many famous and celebrated individuals interred in the Cemetery. They include:

Epidemiologist Dr. John Snow
Suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst
Tenor Richard Tauber
Author George Borrow
Critic and journalist Bernard Levin
V&A founder Henry Cole
Cricketer/publisher John Wisden (of Wisden Almanack fame)
Egyptologist Joseph Bonomi
Novelist George Henty
Shipping magnate Sir Samuel Cunard
Colonialist Admiral Sir Charles Fremantle
Playwright Walter Brandon Thomas
Composer Constant Lambert
Auctioneer Samuel Leigh Sotheby
Actor/wrestler Brian Glover
Exiled Polish wartime leader Tomasz Arciszewski
No less than 12 recipients of the Victoria Cross, Britain's highest award for military gallantry.

Brompton Cemetery is supported and protected by local charity . The Friends provide a range of fascinating tours, events and publications about the Cemetery and can be contacted through the website link. They have worked closely with Deceased Online and we thank them for their advice, assistance and cooperation and much of the detail and history above.

Note: to comply with UK data protection and GDPR, addresses of the deceased are masked in burial register scans for the last 15 years.