The book is divided into two parts; Part One records the origins of London's cemeteries and their rich variety of buildings, monuments, epitaphs, flora and fauna, and includes introductory chapters on cemetery history, planning, and architecture, epitaphs and natural history; Part Two features a gazetteer which describes in detail over 200 cemeteries in Greater London together with short biographies of the celebrated people buried in them.The callous neglect of many cemeteries today is reviewed and a new chapter discusses the valiant efforts made by local groups to halt the vandalism. There are two indexes, one listing over 2000 names of the dead mentioned in the gazetteer, and a secondary index of the architects, landscapers and sculptors whose work is represented in the cemeteries. The text is illustrated throughout with over 100 photographs.London Cemeteries is an important source for biographical and geological research and a compendium of material for the architectural historian. Geologists, genealogists, historians, students of architecture and sculpture, social and local historians will also find much of interest, whilst a chapter for ecologists provides more detail on these unique wild plots in Central London.
