The design of the early British cemeteries.

Abstract

Shelley's description of a cemetery in the south could not have been applied to British urban burial-grounds at the time. Gray's celebrated 'Elegy' captured much of the atmosphere of a rural churchyard in verdant, lowland England, but the urban dead could never claim to be ‘each in his narrow cell for ever laid’, for conditions were so overcrowded that tenure of a grave was often decidedly limited.