INTRODUCTION The relationship between death and architecture is one that predates to ancient times. Adolf Loos famously wrote “When we come across a mound in the wood, six feet long and three feet wide, raised in a pyramidal form by means of a spade, we become serious and something in us says: somebody lies buried here. This is architecture.”1 The grave engenders emotions of seriousness created by the construction of the mound, intentionally formed to mark a burial site, as it is the task of architecture to evoke emotions through the construction of a curated space. Adolf Loos was not alone in believing that architecture began with the burial site; historically, finding a place for the dead was as much a predecessor of town planning as designing burial sites was for architecture. Presently, cities are entities with limited resources of land and this will only become more limited in the future. Thus, every city faces the dilemma of how to meet the demands of residents, corporations and future prospects with the limited funds and land they are in control of. An oversight that needs focus, is how to facilitate the land available to honour the dead? The way in which this question is resolved will represent the city and its residents.
Currently, the deceased are buried or cremated with the cremation rate in the UK being 78% as reported by the United Kingdom’s Cremation Society,3 surpassing traditional ground burials as the preferred method in Britain. This can be attributed to a shift in societal preferences on the freedom that is achieved through cremation in comparison to a burial that is bound to a location. Yet, London still prefers burials over cremation and this will be explored further in this dissertation. To investigate social preferences for laying their loved ones to rest, the UK’s Funeral Guide website compared the costs of burials and cremations. The findings revealed that “The average cost of cremation in the U.K. is £823”, whereas “The average cost of burial in the U.K. is £1698.”4 Figure 1 Illustrates the regions in the UK and the average cost of cremation and burials. The results illustrate that London is amongst the cheapest regions for cremation and the most expensive in terms of burials in the UK.
In this dissertation I will research the lack of burial spaces in London. As cemetery experts have issued warnings over the impending burial crisis for decades that have largely been ignored. A study in 2013 by the BBC found that “Almost half of England’s cemeteries could run out of space within the next 20 years.”2. However, this crisis has already hit London as it is a city with finite availability of land in comparison to the rest of the UK. Many cemeteries within the boroughs of London have reached their capacity.
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(Heymann, 2011) Strange ways-Booth, 2013) (Progress of Cremation in the British Islands from 1885 to 2019, 2020) (UK Cremation & Burial Costs, 2020)
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